These were New Orleans' officers of the law. The keepers of the peace.

For reasons that have never been satisfactorily answered, Adolph Archie was not taken into the hospital, but was driven to a station house in the precinct of the officer he had killed. There he was fatally beaten.

The issue is not whether Adolph Archie deserved to die, but whether police officers can be trusted to uphold the law. Large numbers of officers in New Orleans have proved again and again that they cannot. And in New Orleans, as in many other cities, the nefarious activities of the police are routinely covered up, rationalized and even encouraged by other public officials.

In the Archie case, the coroner of Orleans Parish, Dr. Frank Minyard, filed an autopsy report that protected the police. Based on Dr. Minyard's findings, Archie could have died in an accident -- a bad fall, for example. In fact, Archie had suffered massive injuries. His skull was fractured and his teeth kicked in. Most of the bones in his face were broken. His larynx was fractured. And there was severe hemorrhaging in his testicles.

Nearly a month later, after an independent (and accurate) autopsy had been performed, Dr. Minyard had a change of heart. He agreed that the cops had beaten Archie to death. "It is my decision," he wrote, "that the classification of the death is homicide, police intervention."

It didn't matter. No cops were indicted. There were no criminal or administrative sanctions.

New Orleans officials claim they are trying to clean up the Police Department's act. We'll see. More important is the fact that the grotesque criminal behavior by so many New Orleans officers is at the extreme end of a tragic continuum of police brutality and corruption that has warped the criminal justice system and claimed innocent lives in many American cities.