Interim Birmingham deputy chief of patrol operations appointed
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — The Birmingham Police Department's new interim deputy chief of patrol operations was revealed Monday.
Cpt. Raymond Cochran has worked for the BPD for 36 years, according to the city. He has been the commander of the narcotics division, crimes against property division, tactical operations division and south and west precincts.
Brighton City Councilman Jerome McMullin charged with releasing video of double homicide during active investigation
He recently served as the acting deputy chief of patrol operations. Cochran's appointment from Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin comes after deputy chief Onree Pruitt retired. Cochran, a Miles College graduate, is a veteran of Operation Desert Storm and Operation Enduring Freedom.
The city also announced that Edmond Hanks, who was appointed interim assistant chief of police in November, retired Friday. The vacant post will not be filled immediately, according to the city.
Michael Pickett has worked as chief of police since April 1 after assuming an interim title in November.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘Deceit, dishonesty, betrayal': The wrongful conviction that haunted Johnnie Cochran
He was an uncommonly dangerous man, in the FBI's eyes, a combat-toughened killer who had returned from Vietnam to wage war on the Establishment. 'We are going to drive the pigs out of the community,' Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt, the 21-year-old leader of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, told a reporter in 1970. Pratt was stout, compact and level-eyed, with a raspy drawl bespeaking his childhood on the Louisiana bayou. He envisioned a violent end at the hands of police, whom he cast as an occupying army in African American neighborhoods. 'The next time you see me, I might be dead.' When he went on trial in 1972 — on charges he murdered a white schoolteacher, execution-style, during a robbery — he insisted he was being framed. His defense attorney, a young Johnnie Cochran Jr., initially dismissed Pratt's talk as paranoia. But Cochran would later describe the case as 'a twilight zone of deceit, dishonesty, betrayal and official corruption.' Pratt's conviction kept him behind bars for 27 years, and the case haunted Cochran, who believed Pratt was innocent and who had made a mistake at trial that prosecutors skillfully exploited. In the authorities' war against perceived subversives, it would be years before it became clear how brazenly they had cheated. 'It looked on the surface like a really straightforward murder case,' said Stuart Hanlon, now 76, the radical San Francisco defense attorney who took up Pratt's appeal as a law student and pursued it doggedly for decades. The victim was Caroline Olsen, 27, who was with her husband on a Santa Monica tennis court in December 1968 when a pair of gunmen approached demanding money. The men ordered the couple to lie face down, then began opening fire. She was fatally wounded; her husband was struck but survived. The robbers got $18. The investigation stalled, and Pratt was not a suspect until 1970, when Julius 'Julio' Butler, a beautician and former police officer, implicated him. Butler had been a Panther himself, and had resented Pratt's elevation as Los Angeles leader. The state's star witness, Butler testified that Pratt had dropped by his beauty shop and announced he was going on a 'mission' and later pointed to an article about the Santa Monica shooting to confirm it was his doing. Cochran asked Butler if he had ever been a police informant. Butler flatly denied it. Devastatingly for the defense, Olsen's widower pointed to the defendant and said: 'That's the man who murdered my wife.' Cochran argued against the reliability of cross-racial witness identification, particularly under conditions of stress, and put on the stand a witness who had seen Pratt in the Bay Area around the time of the killing. He also put on Pratt, who had been decorated for heroism during two tours in Vietnam with the Army, and who showed what Cochran called a 'soldier's contempt' for whomever shot the helpless Olsen in the back. Cochran thought it was a winnable case, but he introduced an exhibit that backfired terribly. It was a Polaroid, given to him by Pratt's brother, who insisted it had been taken a week after the shooting. It showed Pratt with a beard, which contradicted the widower's initial description of the shooter as 'a clean-shaven black man.' Prosecutors countered with a Polaroid employee who said the film had not even been manufactured until five months after the crime, a blow to the defense's credibility that left jurors doubting Pratt's other claims. It took jurors 10 days to find him guilty of first-degree murder. The sentence was 25 years to life. 'You're wrong. I didn't kill that woman,' Pratt erupted. 'You racist dogs.' Pratt spent the next eight years in solitary confinement. He was shuttled among prisons, and eventually allowed conjugal visits; his wife gave birth to two children. At a series of unsuccessful parole hearings, the panel waited for him to say he was sorry. He insisted he hadn't done it. 'The last person I killed,' he would say, 'was in Vietnam.' There was much the authorities had not shared with Pratt's defense team. They did not reveal that Olsen's widower had previously identified another man as the shooter. (The man had been in jail at the time and could not have done it.) Nor did they reveal the scope of the star witness' work as an informant for law enforcement officials. Based on FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Pratt's lawyers pieced together a picture of Butler's intimate involvement with the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. County district attorney's office in dozens of cases. To FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the Panthers had been the most dangerous group in the country, homegrown terrorists with stockpiles of weapons and alarming Maoist rhetoric. His secret COINTELPRO program was a campaign of spying, wiretaps and sabotage aimed at crushing perceived subversives and thwarting 'the coalition of militant black nationalist groups.' 'Geronimo was targeted by the FBI because he was a natural leader,' Hanlon said. As Hanlon pieced together documents, it became clear that Butler had been helping. Rejecting appeal after appeal, however, courts ruled that Butler had not been an informant — he had been 'a contact and nothing more,' according to one judge — and that Pratt did not deserve a new trial. He was still considered dangerous. 'If he chooses to set up a revolutionary organization upon his release from prison, it would certainly be easy for him to do so,' a prosecutor said at one parole hearing. 'He does have this network out there.' When defense lawyers brought their evidence to then-L.A. County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti in 1993, they presented it as a chance to undo the injustice his predecessors had sanctioned two decades earlier. But Garcetti's review dragged on for years, and the attorneys turned again to the courts. This time, the courts granted a hearing. Because the L.A. County Superior Court bench was recused — the original prosecutor was now an L.A. County judge and a probable witness — the case was transferred to Orange County Superior Court. For Pratt's supporters, this provoked a chill. What hope did they have in a staunchly conservative county? But Judge Everett Dickey surprised them. 'It's clear that this is not a typical case,' Dickey said. 'It cries out for resolution.' This time, Pratt's team was armed with evidence never heard at the original trial. They had the testimony of a retired FBI agent who supported Pratt's claim that he had been in Oakland during the killing. They knew that the D.A.'s office had allowed Butler to plead no contest to four felonies in exchange for probation, around the time he testified against Pratt. And they had an index card, recently discovered by one of Garcetti's investigators in the office files, that listed Butler as a D.A. informant. It was filed under B; it had been there all along. 'It had never been turned over to the defense. How could they have not turned this over?' Garcetti said in a recent interview. 'I couldn't find anyone who would fess up to the fact that, 'Yeah, we had that document in the files.'' Still, Garcetti's prosecutors downplayed the card's importance. Butler was not an informant, they argued vehemently, but merely a 'source.' In late 1996, Cochran finally got a chance to confront Butler. He had waited years. Butler had become an attorney and an official at a prominent Los Angeles church. He insisted he had been merely a 'liaison' between law enforcement and the Panthers. Cochran asked him his definition of informant. He admitted he had told the FBI that Pratt had a submachine gun. He said his definition of an informant was someone who supplied accurate information. 'So under your own definition, you were informing to the FBI?' Cochran asked. 'You could say that,' Butler said. Dickey threw out Pratt's conviction, concluding that Butler had lied and that prosecutors had hidden evidence that could have led to Pratt's acquittal. Pratt was released on bail in June 1997, to the cheers of his supporters. 'The greatest moment of my legal career,' Cochran called it. Pratt flew home to Morgan City, La., 'to see my mama and my homefolks,' he said. 'It wasn't easy getting here.' He said he wanted to hear rain on the tin roof of his childhood home. Pratt's legal ordeal was not over, however. Garcetti appealed, saying he had found no evidence pointing to Pratt's innocence. He did not drop the case until an appeals court sided with Pratt in February 1999. The following year, Pratt won $4.5 million in a false-imprisonment lawsuit against the city of L.A. and the FBI. He bought a farmhouse in Imbaseni, Tanzania, where he enjoyed the companionship of Pete O'Neal, a former Black Panther who had fled the U.S. in 1970. O'Neal found him dead at home in May 2011. Pratt had been hospitalized with high blood pressure, a condition that had plagued him for years, but had torn out his IVs and gone home. He hated confinement. He was 63. 'We always say, 'The system works,' but no, the system only produced the right result because Geronimo and the community and a band of lawyers fought the system. The system doesn't work by itself,' said Mark Rosenbaum, one of the lawyers who helped with Pratt's appeal. 'They took away half of his life. And they couldn't break him.' So, who killed Caroline Olsen? Hanlon believes the killers were other Black Panthers — a pair of heroin addicts known to feed their habit with armed robbery. They died violently in the 1970s, one by gunfire, the other impaled on a fence during a burglary. In a recent interview, Garcetti, one of the defense team's primary antagonists for years, said that his views on the case have evolved. In retrospect, he regrets fighting to keep it alive. 'He was more likely framed than he was the person who actually committed the crime,' Garcetti said. Since leaving office, he said, he has learned more about the U.S. government's tactics against disfavored groups in the 1960s and '70s. 'I have read enough to know the FBI, from the top down, were working to isolate any quote-unquote leader in the Black Panther movement, and it wouldn't shock me to learn that they went after people who really hadn't committed a crime that they were bent on removing from the scene.'
Buzz Feed
4 days ago
- Buzz Feed
Iranian Trump Supporter Detained By ICE, Wife Shocked
An Alabama woman married to an Iranian immigrant says her family regrets supporting President Donald Trump and his aggressive immigration policies after ICE detained her husband over the weekend as part of a recent round-up of Iranian nationals. 'We believed in his [Trump's] immigration policies and were completely blindsided and truly believed that only criminals were being detained,' Morgan Gardner told Newsweek. Gardner's husband, Ribvar Karimi, was one of 11 Iranian nationals arrested Sunday and taken into the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security claimed the arrests reflect its 'commitment to keeping known and suspected terrorists out of American communities.' DHS has painted Karimi as a threat to national security, saying he served as a sniper in the Iranian army from 2018 to 2021 and had an Islamic Republic of Iran army identification card. Military service is compulsory in Iran for all men aged 18–49. Draft evaders face prosecution and may lose their social benefits and civil rights, including employment, education, and the ability to leave the country. Deserters face imprisonment. 'We have been saying we are getting the worst of the worst out—and we are. We don't wait until a military operation to execute; we proactively deliver on President Trump's mandate to secure the homeland,' DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. Gardner told CBS affiliate WIAT that her husband 'never fought any American forces or our allies,' and said 'he actually fought ISIS himself and was captured at one point' during his service. According to the couple's wedding website, they first met online playing the video game Call of Duty: Mobile. 'He brought happiness back to me, and taught me what it is like to be loved correctly,' Gardner wrote on the site. 'He encouraged me, and still encourages me each and every day. He sees the best in me, and never has given up, despite how difficult I can be sometimes.' Gardner's cousin Cyndi Edwards wrote in a GoFundMe set up to offset legal fees that the couple spent years 'meeting in Turkey while navigating the complex immigration process.' 'Ribvar quickly became a beloved member of Morgan's rural Alabama community, supporting her family and friends, and caring for Morgan's father during a health crisis,' Edwards wrote. 'Most importantly, Ribvar helped Morgan find her self-worth and guided her toward a healthier, happier life.' DHS said Karimi entered the US legally in October 2024 under a K-1 marriage visa reserved for people engaged to American citizens. However, he never adjusted his status, which is a legal requirement, and not doing so can trigger a removal order. Gardner told WIAT that her attorney said previous administrations would not have let her husband be taken away and that he should have been protected because he is married to a US citizen. She added that she and Karimi put his green card application on hold after she found out she was pregnant and had pregnancy complications. 'I understand that they've got a job to do, immigration, but I just feel like he was specifically targeted because of what's going on where he's from, his home country,' Gardner told WIAT. Gardner is seven months pregnant, but remains hopeful that her husband will be with her when she gives birth. 'My heart is broken,' Gardner told the outlet. 'Our baby shower is going to be next weekend, and he's not going to be at home to go to that with me.' Giving birth alone is not Gardner's only fear. She told Newsweek that Karimi's family worries that if he were to be deported back to Iran, the government would kill him due to his open support for the US and opposition to the Iranian regime. 'My husband himself, even being from Iran, supported Trump, his immigration policies, and understood he was trying to protect the American people and was praying he helped free the Iranian people,' Gardner told Newsweek. While Morgan told the outlet she did not vote in the previous presidential election, her family has supported Trump in the past and now feels betrayed. 'Everyone feels like a fool and regrets the decision. I personally didn't vote in the last election, and neither did my parents. At this point, I believe there are bad people on the left and the right,' Gardner said.
Vox
5 days ago
- Vox
Why the US just can't quit Middle East wars
is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map. A view of the famous anti-US mural in central Tehran, Iran, that depicts the US flag with bombs and skulls on April 10. Hossein Beris/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images In April 1980, President Jimmy Carter authorized Operation Eagle Claw, an ill-fated military operation to rescue the American hostages held at the US embassy in Iran. Since then, every US president has ordered at least one — usually more than one — military intervention in the Middle East and North Africa. Under Ronald Reagan, there was the bombing of Libya and the deployment of Marines to Lebanon. Under George H.W. Bush, there was Operation Desert Storm. Under Bill Clinton, airstrikes against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq and against al-Qaeda in Sudan. Under George W. Bush, the invasion of Iraq. Under Barack Obama, a multicountry counterterrorist drone campaign, the toppling of Muammar al-Qaddafi's regime in Libya, and the redeployment of US troops to Iraq to fight ISIS. Under Donald Trump's first term, an expanded campaign against ISIS, missile strikes against the Syrian regime, and the targeted assassination of Iran's most powerful military leaders. Under Joe Biden, the deployment of US troops to the region following the October 7, 2023, attack and the airstrikes against Yemen's Houthi rebels. Now, in his second term, Trump has crossed another Rubicon, becoming the first US president to use military force on the soil of America's longtime adversary, Iran. Though a ceasefire has now been declared, it's very possible this crisis is only beginning, particularly if, as US intelligence agencies reportedly believe, much of Iran's nuclear program is still intact after the strikes. Trump's pivot toward the Middle East is a surprising turn from this president. This is a very different message from the one he delivered in Saudi Arabia just last month when he decried 'neocons' and 'interventionists' for ill-considered attempts to remake the region through force. Trump has said in the past, in reference to the Iraq war, that 'GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY,' and he has generally appeared to view the region — apart from wealthy Gulf States — as a hopeless war zone with little to offer the US. While he was often stymied in his attempts to withdraw troops in his first term by hawkish advisers, this time many of his senior appointees have been so-called 'restrainers,' who advocate pulling back from US military commitments overseas or 'prioritizers,' who want to shift attention to what they see as the more important challenge posed by China. Until very recently, they appeared to have the upper hand. But in the current crisis, the US actually relocated important military assets from the Pacific to the Middle East to the consternation of some Pentagon officials. The stated desire to end 'endless wars' in the Middle East and shift to bigger priorities is something the Trump administration has in common with the other two post-Iraq war presidencies. Barack Obama was elected in large part because of his opposition to the war in Iraq. In 2011, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, promised a 'pivot' to Asia and the Pacific for US foreign policy priorities. The Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS got in the way of that, and the phrase 'pivot to Asia' became a running joke in US foreign policy circles. Joe Biden withdrew US troops from Afghanistan — not a Middle Eastern country but very much the archetypal 'endless war' of the post-9/11 era — and put forward a foreign policy vision emphasizing great power competition with China. His national security adviser infamously described the Middle East as 'quieter than it has been in decades' just days before the October 7 attacks shattered that quiet and shifted his boss's priorities. 'Right now, President Trump is having what I call his 'Michael Corleone' moment, and at some point, every president has one,' said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, referring to Al Pacino's famous line in The Godfather III, 'Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.' But why does this dynamic keep repeating? Why, 45 years after Operation Eagle Claw and 22 after the invasion of Iraq, can't the US military 'get out' of this region? The Middle East is still important…and still has a lot of problems One big reason why the US keeps getting drawn into the Middle East's crises is that those crises keep happening. 'The Middle East is an area of enduring national security interest of the United States, and it's far from stable,' said Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 'And as a result, we're going to keep getting dragged in until it reaches something resembling stability.' Why is it an important interest? The simple answer is economics. The Middle East contains two of the global economy's most important chokepoints: the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of global oil flows, and the Red Sea, through which 12 percent of global trade flowed until shipping was disrupted by Houthi attacks. The 'no blood for oil' slogans of Iraq War protesters were an oversimplification, but it's undoubtedly true that keeping the region's oil and gas flowing to the world has been a US priority since Franklin Roosevelt met with the king of Saudi Arabia aboard a cruiser on the Suez Canal in 1945, kicking off the modern US-Saudi relationship. In the 1970s, the principle that the US would use military force to prevent any country from a hostile takeover of the Gulf region, and its vast energy supplies, was enshrined as the 'Carter Doctrine.' Today, thanks to domestic production, the US is much less directly dependent on Middle Eastern oil than it used to be, but disruptions in the region can cause global energy prices to spike. Beyond economics, events ranging from the 9/11 attacks to the Syrian refugee crisis have illustrated that the Middle East's regional politics don't always stay regional. America's unique relationship with Israel is another reason why the US is continually involved in regional crises. For decades, the US has supported Israel and attempted, with mixed success, to help mediate its relationships with its neighbors and with the Palestinian territories. But the US military actually actively participating in Israel's wars rather than just sending weapons — as happened to some extent under Biden and now much more explicitly under Trump — is a fairly new dynamic. America is still the region's preeminent outside power Ever since the 1960s, when Britain withdrew many of its 'East of Suez' troop deployments, America has been the preeminent military power in the region. That remains true despite growing concern in Washington about China or Russia's influence. When crises do erupt, the US, with more than 40,000 troops in bases throughout the region and close security and political partnerships with key powers in the region, is often the outside power best positionedto intervene. When the Houthis began attacking shipping traveling through the Red Sea, there was little question of what country would lead the operation to combat them, much to the irritation of America Firsters like Vice President JD Vance. Michael Wahid Hanna, director of the US program at Crisis Group, says another reason the US often feels compelled to intervene in Middle East crises is that it 'had a major role in fomenting' something. He pointed to what he called the 'two great sins of the post-Cold War era for the United States,' the failure to secure a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the 1990s, when the US enjoyed far more leverage than it does today, and the invasion of Iraq. Both continue to drive instability in the region today. As Secretary of State Colin Powell's famous 'Pottery Barn rule' warned in the run-up to the war in Iraq, 'if you break it, you own it.' What if we're the problem? Advocates of US engagement in the Middle East argue that if we pull back, it will create power vacuums that will be filled by malign actors. Obama felt compelled to redeploy US troops to Iraq just three years after withdrawing them when the country's military collapsed in the face of ISIS. But advocates of foreign policy restraint argue that the US isn't doomed to keep intervening, and that its presence isn't actually helping. Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, believes that US security partnerships can actually embolden governments in the Middle East to escalate crises, knowing that they can count on US support to deal with the consequences. The most recent illustration is Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to attack Iran, made under the correct assumption that he would have backup from the Trump administration. 'What we have is a delusion in which we think that we can continue to maintain close security partnerships with states in the Middle East, station hundreds of thousands of US service members around the region indefinitely, and that somehow the next bombing will restore deterrence, and we'll get to peace and stability,' he said. 'That hasn't worked for my whole lifetime. Taking the long view Whether you think America is uniquely positioned to provide stability or that it's the cause of the instability, voters should probably treat promises of pivots away from the Middle East with skepticism. Promising to bring American troops home is always going to be a political winner. And whether it's a rising China or America's own borders, one thing there's agreement on across the political spectrum is that America's core security interests are not in the Middle East. That's especially true as the country's post-9/11 focus on terrorism has faded. But, says Michael Rubin, senior fellow and Mideast specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, 'Most Americans understand history through the lens of four-year increments. We believe each administration starts with a tabula rasa.' Administrations are often optimistic that one military campaign (such as Israel's recent decimation of Iran's Axis of Resistance) or one grand bargain (such as the Biden administration's attempts to reach a Saudi-Israel normalization deal that would also revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process) will resolve the region's issues enough that America can move on to other things. The region's leaders, many of whom have been in power for decades, often take a longer view. More likely is that the regional crises, some of which we've played a role in creating, will be occupying America's attention for administrations to come.
