Former city officers given probation

By Cindy Landrum  

MAY 28, 2010 9:49 a.m. (0)

Prosecutor: Greenville’s police department “clean, straight arrow.”

Two former Greenville police officers received probationary sentences Friday for depriving suspects of their civil rights in which attorneys on both sides said were isolated incidents of officers losing their cool, not targeted abuse of the homeless.

Matthew Jowers and Jeremiah Milliman were both sentenced to three years probation by federal Magistrate Judge William Catoe.

Catoe ordered Jowers, who pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of deprivation of civil rights, to perform 250 hours of community service. Milliman, who pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors, was ordered to perform 300 hours of community service.

“We all make mistakes,” Catoe told the former officers before imposing the sentences. “It’s what a man does after those mistakes.”

Allegations that four former city police officers abused the homeless broke last September.

“When all this broke, my greatest fear was that it was systemic in the Greenville Police Department,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney David Stephens, who has worked with the department as a federal prosecutor since 1984. “But they helped us prove that the Greenville Police Department was as clean and straight arrow as I believed it to be.”

After the court proceeding, Stephens called the incidents an “aberration.”

Stephens told Catoe the U.S. Department of Justice views incarceration as an appropriate sentence in violations of this nature.

But, he said, the officers provided substantial assistance in the investigation and have exemplary military and police records.

“They helped us determine the Greenville Police Department is a good department,” Stephens said.

Just prior to leaving the police department, Milliman tackled and disarmed a man who had carjacked a special needs bus, his attorney Ryan Beasley said.

The week after his resignation, he had been scheduled to receive a Lifesaver award from the department for, ironically, saving the life of a homeless man who had been shot three times, Beasley said. Using the training he received in two tours of duty in Kuwait and Iraq to tie a tourniquet around his leg, keeping him alive until paramedics arrived on the scene.

“In both of these incidents he acted wrongly. Both were handcuffed but both were intoxicated and resisting arrest,” Beasley said. “He lost control and regrets it.”

Milliman pleaded guilty to two incidents last September. In the first, he admitted to poking a man with a pen and pouring hand sanitizer over his head.

In the second, Milliman hit a man who was in the back of a patrol car with his forearm. Jowers was involved in the same incident and admitted to slamming the man into the side of the patrol car so hard it left a dent and wrapping his hands around the man’s neck while he was in the back seat.

The man involved in that incident has a home and a job, said Jowers’ attorney, Beattie Ashmore.

“Early reports said homeless people were being targeted. There was no targeting of those people by the police department,” Ashmore said.

Stephens said the case is still under investigation.

He said charges against one more officer are possible.

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