Verdict announced in (Billings, MT) police officer's case

A city police officer was awarded $1.3 million in damages this afternoon by a District Court jury that found merit in all claims by him that supervisors retaliated against him when he reported alleged misconduct within the Billings Police Department.

The verdict was announced at 4:35 p.m. after 11 hours of deliberations over two days. The trial that spanned eight days and included testimony from numerous witnesses, including Mayor Ron Tussing, City Administrator Tina Volek and top officers in the Police Department.

In the lawsuit filed last year, Officer Steve Feuerstein claimed his career was stalled when and his supervisors began retaliating against him when in February 2002 he reported that fellow officers in the K-9 unit had given illegal drugs to a civilian dog handler.

Further comments at Montana Headlines

The significance of this verdict to the Montana political scene is that the mayor of Billings, Ron Tussing, was chief of police at the time that all of this wrongdoing took place. He was captain of the ship, and it seems he ran it into an iceberg.

And the significance of that is that Tussing seems to have been in the process of being groomed for bigger and better things by the Montana Democratic Party.

Our mayoral elections are nonpartisan, but the Montana Democratic smear machine clearly went to work for Tussing in that campaign -- with success.

As anyone familiar with Montana juries knows, this is an extraordinarily large settlement for Yellowstone County -- whose jurors tend not to feel terribly sorry for whiners and complainers. The mean income in Billings isn't very high, so awards that our juries consider to be fair tend to be pretty low.

So the evidence must have been very convincing to them.

We can only hope that this puts the kibosh on Tussing's political ambitions -- he is a slippery fellow, and even if we have to have a Democrat, we have far better ones than him.

Oh, and he signed on to Mayor Bloomberg's anti-gun program, too. A real winner.

There's much more -- just go to Montana Headlines and do a search for "Tussing," and there will be a string of posts providing further information.

An added note : this tells the rest of the states, and the world beyond, that what passes for corrupt business as usual in Montana politics, doesn’t get a pass. We NAIL suckers like this billings mayor. And since he’s a dem, this may effect the state ‘08 vote in billings. As billings goes, our largest city, usually so goes the state.

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