Council advised to settle

• By SCOTT DYER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: May 4, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The Metro Council is being asked to pay a $1 million settlement to a Baton Rouge man who served more than 16 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for a rape he didn’t commit.

Gene Bibbins, cleared of the rape in 2003 by DNA testing, has filed a federal lawsuit against the city and against the police officers and technicians who produced the evidence that convicted him.

East Baton Rouge Parish Attorney Wade Shows said 10 to 12 lawyers reviewed the case and recommended the settlement. Shows described it as the largest city-parish settlement with which he’s familiar.

Shows said that in a wrongful incarceration case such as this, there’s a chance a jury could find damages far in excess of $1 million.
If approved, the settlement would be paid in increments of $333,333 annually during a three-year period.

In his lawsuit, Bibbins claims that investigating police officers ignored the 13-year-old victim’s description of the rapist as having long, curly hair. Instead, the lawsuit asserts, police focused on Bibbins, who had short hair, because he had picked up a radio that was stolen from the girl’s room by the rapist.

The proposed settlement comes a year after a federal judge issued a ruling indicating that Baton Rouge police may have fabricated and hid evidence to wrongfully convict Bibbins.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge James Brady also suggested the city may be liable for violating Bibbins’ civil rights because it “provided its officers with practically no training whatsoever in conducting identification techniques.”

A jury convicted Bibbins in 1987, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

The victim told police she had just gone to sleep in a second-floor bedroom in the Duane Street public housing complex when a man climbed through her window, pushed a knife against her throat and raped her.

When he left, the rapist stole a Sony cassette radio with a broken handle.

In their reports, Officers Richard Remington and Robin Davis said the victim described her attacker as a black man in his late 20s or early 30s with short hair, dark skin and a beard and mustache, wearing a red-and-white-striped shirt and who had a gold earring in his left ear.

The officers did not report the first suspect they brought for the victim to identify was 17, clean-shaven and had long, curly hair.
A half-hour later, the officers  found Bibbins carrying the stolen radio. The victim then identified Bibbins, sitting in the rear seat of a police cruiser, as her attacker.

“Bibbins’ position is that (the victim) provided Remington and Davis with a different description of her alleged attacker, and that Remington and Davis later falsified their reports to match Bibbins’ characteristics,” Brady said in his ruling.