BATON ROUGE, La. - The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI are now charged with finding out what happened Tuesday morning in front of the Triple S food mart in Baton Rouge.
However, some community leaders are concerned about a line in the Louisiana Bill of Rights when it comes to officers that are under investigation. The line reads “The police employee or law enforcement officer shall be granted up to 30 days to secure such representation, during which time all questioning shall be suspended.”
"Nobody else is given 30 days before they are questioned to get a lawyer, figure out what it is that they're going to say and how they want to frame it before they're investigated" said Marjorie Esman with ACLU Louisiana.
Esman said that raises several questions of accountability.
"They are trained officers of the law, they are trained to protect the rights of everyone and they should be held, if anything, to a higher standard of accountability" said Esman.
Eric Hessler, the legal counsel for the Police Association of New Orleans, says the bill only protects officers under administrative investigation.
"The federal government, the police department, or any other person that's doing a criminal investigation couldn't compel those officers to come in and tell them their side of the story," he said. "They could invoke their 5th amendment protections.”
Hessler says in an administrative investigation they will have to say what happened. But that statement still couldn't be used in court. The Bill of Rights says “No statement made by the police employee or law enforcement officer during the course of an administrative investigation shall be admissible in a criminal proceeding.”
"The Baton Rouge police department could make these officers come in today and tell them what happened but that could in no way shape or form be passed on to criminal investigators or be used to even further the criminal investigation" said Hessler.
It's possible that no one will hear the officers side of story including federal investigators until a trial, if it goes that far.