South Florida Police Chief sentenced to 3 years in prison for framing Black men
A former South Florida police chief in search of perfect stats decided to frame a number of Black men and now he’s the one headed to jail.
Raimundo Atesiano, the former chief of the Biscayne Park Police Department, was sentenced to three years in prison after he was discovered to have directed his officers to frame innocent black men for a series of unsolved burglaries. He also admitted that he cracked under pressure from community leaders to bring down the city’s property crimes record.
“When I took the job, I was not prepared,” Atesiano told a federal judge on Tuesday. “I made some very, very bad decisions.”
Those bad decisions included, according to the Miami Herald, ordering two officers to arrest 35-year-old Clarence Desrouleaux in Feb. 2013 for breaking into two homes in the area because “there was reliable information that he had forged and cashed a check stolen during the course of” a third burglary.
Desrouleaux, 35, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. He was later deported to Haiti.
Once it was revealed that Atresiano ordered the framing, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office threw out the wrongful conviction.
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A year later, Atesiano ordered the arrest of Erasmus Banmah for five unsolved car break-ins without any evidence. The chief also ordered 2 officers to falsify the arrest affidavits for a 16-year-old black suspect for four unsolved break-ins in June 2013, a month before then-police chief Atesiano touted the town’s 100 percent burglary clearance record at a village commission meeting.
The charges against the teen were also eventually dropped after the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office noticed the four arrest affidavits all used similar vague language.
“He fabricated evidence. He damaged lives,” Miami-Dade Public Defender Carlos Martinez said. “Even before he was chief, Atesiano issued 2,200 traffic tickets himself in one year, fabricated cases, and wrongfully arrested innocent individuals,”.
“He created a culture of corruption that has further eroded public trust in the criminal justice system,” Martinez continued. “Just as appalling is the damage Atesiano has done to law-abiding, hardworking, police officers and chiefs.”
Atesiano pleaded guilty in September to a conspiracy charge of depriving the three suspects of their civil rights because he and the officers charged them without a legal basis. The Government recommended he get 33 months but he could have received as much as 10 years.
