Latest News: Spokane Police Department

From Center for Justice, latest news on Spokane Police Department's fiasco in the making over the death of Otto Zehm last year. (full article here)

The Justice Department’s latest filing in the Zehm case offers a new look inside the pressure cooker that likely awaits the Spokane Police Department and its attorneys at trial later this year.

The 75-page filing by Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Durkin featured in Thursday’s front page Spokesman-Review article, “Feds: Testimony Altered,” is now available here.

Tom Clouse’s story focuses on new assertions being made by the Justice Department that top Spokane police officials, including Assistant Chief Jim Nicks, are now expected to provide trial testimony that will directly dispute the Department’s early accounts of the altercation that lead to the death of Otto Zehm, a 36-year-old man suffering from schizophrenia. Clouse’s story highlights sections of the new filing that indicate Spokane police investigators set out to alter and even discredit eye witness testimony that contradicted the self-defense claims of defendant Karl Thompson, Jr., the Spokane police officer who first encountered Zehm in a north side convenience store the night of March 18, 2006.

Durkin’s brief describes Thompson’s encounter with Zehm as a “violent attack” by the police officer against the affable janitor whose last recorded words were, “I only wanted a Snickers.”