BATON ROUGE, La. (Legal Newsline) – Baton Rouge officials are defending themselves in a lawsuit brought by the attorney for a man who was strip-searched and had his mother's home entered without a warrant.
Lawyer and University of Virginia law professor Thomas Frampton recently sued Baton Rouge, its mayor Sharon Weston Broome and its police chief Murphy Paul, after those defendants filed a petition to jail Frampton for contempt of juvenile court.
They accuse Frampton of illegally releasing protected juvenile criminal records like body cam footage to CBS, which the network used for a report on alleged civil rights violations of Clarence and Tanya Green. Clarence’s younger brother was also searched by police during a traffic stop.
CBS’s report came less than a week after the Greens settled their civil rights case against Baton Rouge for $35,000. Clarence Green had been forced to spend five months in jail during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On July 5, the Baton Rouge defendants filed their motion to dismiss Frampton’s federal lawsuit. They say the federal court should abstain from the issue because the state Juvenile Court is already tasked with deciding Baton Rouge’s contempt motion.
“As Mr. Frampton was not the attorney for Mr. Green in his criminal prosecution, the release of the videos containing the juvenile arrest to Mr. Frampton was improper without a Court order from Juvenile Court,” the defendants argue.
“Regardless, even if Mr. Frampton received this record properly, Art. 412 makes it very clear that Mr. Frampton’s subsequent release of the videos was illegal disclosure unless he had obtain a court order to do so.”
It’s a complicated matter for whichever judge ultimately decides it. According to Frampton, no juvenile criminal proceeding ever existed and Clarence Green was an adult at the time of his civil settlement.
Video footage had been introduced as evidence in Clarence’s adult criminal matter that was later dismissed, which Frampton says makes it public record. Plus, the Green family urged Frampton to release the body cam footage, he says.
And a Juvenile Court judge can’t make the call, Frampton argues. The motion to find him in contempt omits a case number because no case ever existed, he says.