In a continuing effort to force a documentary group to turn over hundreds of videotapes created during the 2004 National Republican Convention in New York, city lawyers recently advanced an unexpected argument: The group, I-Witness Video, may have copies of tapes possibly lost by the district attorney’s office.
The suggestion that evidence could be missing was strongly disputed by a senior official in the district attorney’s office.
In a statement drafted to explain why they want a federal magistrate to order I-Witness to turn over the material, the lawyers referred to tapes — some created by the police — presented as evidence by the Manhattan district attorney’s office during criminal trials stemming from the convention, and then shared by defense lawyers with I-Witness.
A lawyer for the city wrote that it appears that the district attorney’s office “has misplaced or lost many of those tapes.”
A footnote elaborated, saying that “despite our best efforts” the city does not have a complete record of the videotapes used by the district attorney’s office.
Such statements would seem to cast the district attorney’s office in an unenviable light. Few prosecutors would relish the idea that they might have lost track of videotapes.
Daniel Castleman, the chief assistant district attorney, said emphatically on Friday afternoon that those things did not happen.
“I don’t know on what basis they would make those assertions,” Castleman said.
The district attorney’s office has given the city more than 200 videotapes, Castleman said.
He said that he was aware of only one file that could not be found and knew of only one videotape that was edited to remove scenes.
That incident was discovered in 2005 during the trial of a man named Alexander Dunlop, who was accused of ramming a bicycle into police officers and resisting arrest.
An I-Witness member, Eileen Clancy, proved that a police videotape had been altered to remove sections showing Dunlop’s pre-arrest behavior, which did not include the violence a police officer had described under oath.
After Clancy found an unedited videotape that showed Dunlop strolling calmly and then being arrested without a struggle, the district attorney’s office dropped the case against him.
I-Witness Video, a group of archivists and civil liberties advocates, had arranged before the convention to share videotapes of demonstrations and arrests with lawyers representing people arrested during protests.
City lawyers have issued a subpoena to I-Witness and said that they need access to tapes collected by the group because they are vital to a defense against about 600 claims filed in federal court by people who said that they were unjustly arrested and detained during the convention.
Lawyers for I-Witness, which is not part of any lawsuits against the city, have asked a judge to quash the subpoena and said that that the city already had access to hundreds of videotapes showing demonstrations, including many from the police and the district attorney’s office.
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