The Boston Globe reported on a pending civil rights case handled by Nardizzi Inc.: Boston police officer Officer David C. Williams has been placed on paid administrative leave for using unreasonable force while arresting a man in the North End in 2009. Williams then lied about the episode to department investigators, according to an Internal Affairs Division report obtained by the Globe. Our client Michael P. O’Brien, a 30-year-old Middlesex County corrections officer, filed a complaint against Williams and five other officers who arrested him on Hanover Street on the night of March 16, 2009. Williams smashed O’Brien’s head into a concrete sidewalk and choked him, angry that O’Brien was videotaping Williams and his partner with a cellphone as they responded to a minor traffic accident.

This will prove a test of Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis’s policy of dismissing officers who lie in the line of duty, to internal affairs investigators, or in court.

Williams was among the Boston Police officers found responsible for the notorious 1995 beating (and subsequent coverup) of a plainclothes officer, Michael Cox. Williams and the cops said they mistook Cox, who is black, for a murder suspect they were chasing. Cox was nearly beaten to death by fellow officers on on a dead-end street in Mattapan. Cox later sued the city and won $817,000. Williams continues to represent the city as a police officer.

The photo in the Globe article is not Williams; the Globe printed a correction here:

Tags: boston police, David C. Williams, lying, Michael Cox, Michael O'Brien