Serianni v City of Venice, Days 2 & 3

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The trial of Venice Police Officer Demitri Serianni v City of Venice continues today in Federal Court in Tampa. Serianni's attorney, Thomas Sadaka, will likely conclude his prosecution of the civil charges against the city today after calling his two final scheduled witnesses: former City Manager Isaac Turner and Serianni himself.

Over the past three days, the five-woman three-man jury has heard numerous stories of abuse of authority by police officials aimed not just at Serianni, but at a number of lower level police officers. The tale that is being told to the jury through the collective testimonies is that in order to gain rank under ex-chief Julie Williams, you had to have a flexible or non-functioning conscience and a natural penchant for thuggery and bullying.

Jurors heard testimony about the investigative white board in the squad room, usually used to put up details of ongoing criminal investigations, informing officers of new operating procedures or upcoming classes. However for several days in May 2010, then-Chief Julie Williams used the board to post pages from this web site's message board where citizens and police officers had posted information that was critical of her and her leadership along with derogatory pages from Serianni's personnel file.

Serianni v City of Venice -- Day 1

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The opening day, August 6, of the trial of Venice Police Office Demetri Serianni v The City of Venice was for the most part a yawner. At stake is an award to Serianni of anywhere  from $100 k in attorney's fees to a couple of million on pain and suffering punitive damages, so this is not a minor deal. This case is to the current administration what the Sunshine Law lawsuit was to the Ed Martin administration and here, again, the city's legal strategy has bungled what should have been a small case that should have been settled out of court a year ago into a monstrous financial black hole with bottom discernible.

Having followed this case closely from the start, I am pretty comfortable stating that the city will lose this case on a big scale. How big will be up to the jury, five women and three men from all over central Florida.

The first half of the first day was spent on jury selection. Two women from Venice were in the selection pool. The first was a retired university professor from Iowa who now lives on the island of Venice. She stated she had attended functions where former Mayor Ed Martin and former city councilwoman Sue Lang had spoken (both Lang and Martin were on the original witness list, Lang was dropped after telling attorneys that she remembered little and that she has a phobia about traveling on the interstate highways).

This potential juror's comment during voir dire questioning that "the politics in Venice are crazy" earned her a peremptory strike from the city's legal team, this despite Judge Virginia Hernandez-Covington's statement to the city's legal team that she found the statement vague and not meaningful: "People sometimes say things without really thinking about what they are saying."

The other, an RN who works at Venice Regional Hospital, stated she was a social acquaintance of current councilwoman Jeanette Gates (also on the current witness list). Under questioning from the judge, the potential juror stated she and Gates ran "...in the same social circles," but that she did not know Gates all that well. She stated she had heard a bit about this current lawsuit, but not enough to form an opinion. She was eventually selected for the jury.