A former New Orleans police officer who was convicted three years ago in the shooting death of a civilian in the days after Hurricane Katrina, but was granted a retrial on appeal, was acquitted Wednesday on all counts.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/12/us/ex-officer-is-cleared-in-hurricane-katrina-shooting.html?ref=us&_r=0     A jury found the former officer, David Warren, 50, not guilty on two federal charges relating to the death of Henry Glover, who was shot behind a strip mall in a nearly abandoned New Orleans on Sept. 2, 2005.
The verdict was the latest of recent setbacks for the Department of Justice, which has prosecuted New Orleans police officers on charges including falsifying records and killing unarmed citizens in the aftermath of Katrina. In September, a federal judge ordered a new trial for five former police officers convicted in connection with the shootings of citizens, two of whom died, on the Danziger Bridge.
Alongside the criminal prosecutions, federal officials have pushed for a broad overhaul of the city’s Police Department, which is continuing.
The killing of Mr. Glover and the cover-up that followed, while less widely known nationally than the Danziger Bridge shootings, was perhaps the most gruesome of the criminal cases.
Mr. Glover had gone to the mall, also the site of a police substation, to retrieve suitcases that had been left there by others. Mr. Warren, who was guarding the substation, testified that he shouted a warning and shot at Mr. Glover, who he believed was armed, as he ran toward an unlocked gate. A witness who was with Mr. Glover said he was shot while lighting a cigarette, while another officer testified that Mr. Warren shot Mr. Glover while he was running away.
Three men drove a dying Mr. Glover to a school being used as a makeshift police station. There, the men say, they were beaten and handcuffed, while officers took the car they had arrived in, setting it on fire with Mr. Glover inside and leaving the burned-out car on a levee. Though people in the department knew about the episode, it did not become public until a reporter wrote about it in The Nation in 2008.
In 2010, five officers were put on trial in connection with the killing, and three were convicted. Mr. Warren, convicted of manslaughter, was facing 25 years in prison. But the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this year that Mr. Warren should not have been tried in the shooting with those charged in the events that followed, and granted him a new trial.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/law-disorder/