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The West Virginia State Police have agreed to pay Charleston attorney Roger A. Wolfe $200,001.01 to settle his lawsuit over an alleged beating that occurred in the South Charleston barracks while Wolfe was in custody.

Wolfe maintained that on June 17, 2007, following his DUI arrest, two troopers took him to a small room and beat him (with his hands cuffed behind his back) so badly that cranial fluid came out of his nose. While offering slightly differing accounts of how it happened, the troopers suggested that Wolfe became belligerent and lunged at Paul A. Green, who was forced to sweep Wolfe’s legs out from under him to prevent a head-butt.

In any event, Wolfe ended up requiring treatment at Thomas Memorial Hospital. Although he was treated and released that night (and arraigned and jailed; that’s his mugshot to the left), Wolfe later spent six days in the hospital.

The settlement covers all of the troopers that Wolfe said beat him and later covered it up (Green, Jason S. Crane, Kristy L. Layne and John K. Rapp Jr.). It also covers former superintendent D.L. Lemmon, three unnamed troopers and the agency itself. (Court documents indicate that Wolfe wanted to depose troopers L.W. Price, J.T. Portillo and D.O. Bennett, who were reportedly in the barracks at the time of the alleged beating.)

According to filings in the civil case, all seven of the troopers testified in front of a federal grand jury convened in June or July 2008 as part of a criminal inquiry into the alleged beating. The U.S. Attorney’s Office routinely refuses to confirm or deny the existence of a grand jury investigation, and to date, no criminal charges have been filed in the matter.

(Read previous posts related to Wolfe’s lawsuit here, here and here.)

You can read more about this in tomorrow’s Gazette.

Updated: Here is a link to the Gazette’s story on the settlement.

Some of the people who commented on my last post think that the Gazette unfairly focuses on the West Virginia State Police and gives other agencies a free pass. I’m not sure that Charleston Police Chief Brent Webster and Kanawha County Chief Deputy Johnny Rutherford would agree, because I have had conversations a lot like the one I described with both of them on more than one occasion.

Both of those departments investigate allegations of officer misconduct internally. Well, the people who conducted the Charleston Police Department’s double-dipping probe were two senior officers, Capt. Kevin Perdue and Capt. Lex Williamson, and a retired CPD captain, John Tabaretti. (The CPD also has its own Professional Standards unit.)

The CPD objected vigorously — to the point of taking the matter to the state Supreme Court — when the Gazette requested time sheet records of its officers. The CPD’s position seemed to be, Trust us, we know what we’re doing. We don’t need the Gazette looking over our shoulder. Everyone should automatically have faith in the results of our investigation of our own officers. (In a unanimous opinion, the justices re-affirmed that payroll records are public and therefore subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.)

As far as reporting on allegations against the four troopers, it is worth noting that the media — the Gazette included — reports on allegations against suspects in criminal matters before they have been proven in a court of law all the time. (And with the blessing of law enforcement, who sometimes tell us when they will be taking certain suspects to their arraignments. Or do you think we just happen to have cameras at the courthouse every time there’s a “perp walk”?)

There’s a difference between making a complaint and filing a lawsuit. To me, it’s analogous to the difference between someone walking into a police station and saying, “My neighbor stole my lawnmower” and an officer filing a criminal complaint actually charging the neighbor with theft.

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“It’s our policy not to discuss personnel matters.”

That’s the standard answer reporters get when we call a ranking officer at a law enforcement agency and ask if any steps have been taken regarding an allegation of officer misconduct.

“But the public has the right to know if public servants…” we counter, only to run into another stock reply: “The results of internal investigations, if one was conducted, are confidential.” And that’s usually the end of it, because both of us know that internal records are protected by a Freedom of Information Act exemption, and if the police don’t volunteer any additional information, the press has no way of compelling them to produce it.

I ran into this very issue when I tried to figure out last year if any disciplinary action had been taken against any of the four troopers — Jason S. Crane, Paul A. Green, Kristy L. Layne and John K. Rapp Jr. — reportedly involved in the alleged June 2007 beating of Charleston lawyer Roger A. Wolfe while in police custody (and the alleged effort to cover up the incident).

Astute Gazette readers will recall that Layne was the trooper who issued tickets outside former Kanawha Circuit Judge Lyne Ranson’s wedding in July 2007. (Ranson told the Gazette that she felt that Layne and her boyfriend W.C. Moyers, a Kanawha County Sheriff’s deputy, targeted her guests because Ranson represented Moyers’ ex-wife in their divorce proceedings.) That incident led to Gov. Joe Manchin, who attended the reception, calling Kanawha County Sheriff Mike Rutherford at home.

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Charleston lawyer Roger A. Wolfe’s civil lawsuit against the State Police and four of its troopers over his alleged beating while in police custody is still in the discovery phase, and already things have gotten contentious.

(As I reported earlier, the U.S. Attorney’s Office has launched a grand jury investigation into the alleged beating. But this is a separate issue to any possible criminal charges.)

Wolfe asked for copies of the personnel files of the four troopers alleged to have been involved — Paul A. Green, Kristy L. Layne, Jason S. Crane and John K. Rapp Jr. — as well as any records of complaints of misconduct that may have been made against each trooper and any disciplinary action that may have been taken. This is hardly an unusual request during discovery, when both sides exchange information they plan on using during trial.

Incredibly, the State Police’s attorneys, John A. Hoyer and Virginia Grottendieck Lanham, refused, saying that the police have an exemption from disclosing this material under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. And it’s true, the FOIA law does not require the disclosure of “[r]ecords of law-enforcement agencies that deal with the detection and investigation of crime and the internal records and notations of such law-enforcement agencies which are maintained for internal use in matters relating to law enforcement.”

Except…

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