New York Times — April 7, 1999
A Federal prosecutor said Tuesday that his office had been monitoring a case in which one of the police officers who killed Amadou Diallo fatally shot another man in 1997 and would decide whether a Federal inquiry into the earlier shooting was necessary.
The statement by William J. Muller, the executive assistant United States attorney in Brooklyn, came shortly after a spokesman for the family of Patrick Bailey, the man killed in 1997 in Brooklyn, said that the family's representatives had spoken with Zachary W. Carter, the United States Attorney.
The spokesman, Charles Barron, made the statement at a news conference a day after the Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles J. Hynes, said that his own investigation had found that the police officer, Kenneth Boss, had acted properly because Bailey had pointed a shotgun at him and other officers responding to another man's complaint that Bailey had menaced him with the weapon.
But while Officer Boss's lawyer, Steven Brounstein, said that Hynes's exoneration of the officer was warranted, Bailey's parents, Lloyd and Evadine Bailey – speaking emotionally at their news conference outside Hynes's building in downtown Brooklyn – called the prosecutor's report a « cock-and-bull story » and said the case should have been submitted to a grand jury.
In announcing he was closing his investigation without presenting the Bailey shooting to a grand jury, Hynes said that his office had conducted a thorough investigation that led him to conclude that « there is no credible view of the evidence which would support criminal charges » against Officer Boss, who killed Bailey with two bullets in a hallway of Bailey's building in East New York.
Later, after the Baileys' news conference, Hynes issued a statement to explain how his policy had evolved over the years in handling cases of fatal shootings by police officers.
The statement said that when Hynes took office in 1990, each such shooting was presented to a grand jury, but that now each incident was « carefully reviewed by prosecutors to enable » Hynes « to reach an independent determination whether the evidence warrants a presentation to the grand jury. »
The statement said that Hynes's thinking on the matter « evolved over time, and was based upon the experience obtained from investigations of numerous police shooting incidents » between 1990 and 1992.
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