NOPD Officer Len Davis: Murder, Death Sentence, and Commutation

Len Davis is a former New Orleans Police Department officer who, in October 1994, ordered the murder of Kim Marie Groves, a thirty-two-year-old mother of three who had filed a brutality complaint against him. FBI agents investigating Davis for drug corruption were wiretapping his cell phone at the time and captured him arranging and celebrating the killing in real time. He was convicted on federal civil rights charges in 1996 and sentenced to death. In December 2024, President Joe Biden commuted that sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Davis, who maintains his innocence, tried to refuse the commutation and was overruled by a federal judge.

The Murder of Kim Marie Groves

Kim Marie Groves lived in the Lower Ninth Ward. On October 10 or 11, 1994, she witnessed Davis’s patrol partner, Sammie Williams, pistol-whip her seventeen-year-old nephew, Nathan Norwood. She filed a formal brutality complaint with the NOPD’s internal affairs office, naming Davis.¹

The complaint was supposed to be confidential. On October 12, Davis learned about it anyway. It was widely believed that someone inside internal affairs or elsewhere in the department had tipped him off.² Davis contacted Paul Hardy, a drug dealer he protected, and through a mutual associate, Damon Causey, arranged a hit. Hardy would shoot her; Davis and Williams would manage the scene afterward as the responding patrol officers.³

On the evening of October 13, Davis and Williams drove their patrol car through the neighborhood looking for Groves. Davis grew impatient and called Hardy repeatedly. Around 10:00 p.m., he spotted her near her home, paged Hardy with her location and a description of her clothing, and told him to “get that whore.” At approximately 11:00 p.m., Hardy shot Groves once in the head at the corner of Villere and Alabo Streets. She died on the eve of her daughter Jasmine’s thirteenth birthday.³⁴

After the shooting, Davis confirmed the killing over the phone in police codes, mumbling about “the 30” (NOPD signal for homicide) and declaring “N.A.T.,” his shorthand for “necessary action taken.”²

How the FBI Caught Him on Tape

Davis did not know the FBI had been recording his phone the whole time. The bureau had opened an undercover investigation code-named Operation Shattered Shield after a drug dealer named Terry Adams approached agents on Christmas Eve 1993 and said Williams was shaking him down. A wired payment to Williams confirmed the tip, and the operation expanded to include Davis.⁵

By March 1994, an undercover agent posing as a drug trafficker called “J.J.” was meeting with the two officers. The FBI gave them bugged cell phones, wired a Hilton hotel room used for meetings, and staged both real and dummy cocaine shipments for them to guard, paying them at least $100,000 over the course of the operation.⁶ The agents expected to build a drug trafficking prosecution. Instead, their wiretaps caught Davis ordering a murder. Once agents realized what they had, they shut the operation down to prevent further violence.⁵

The Corruption That Preceded the Murder

Davis graduated from the NOPD academy in 1988 and was assigned to patrol the city’s public housing developments. Residents of the Desire project nicknamed him “Robocop” and the “Desire Terrorist.” Between 1987 and 1992, he was the subject of at least twenty complaints, most involving brutality. Nearly all were classified as not sustained. He was suspended for fifty-one days for striking a woman in the head with a flashlight. A fellow officer later described Davis’s internal affairs file as “as thick as a telephone book” and said supervisors had “swept his dirt under the rug.”²

By the early 1990s, Davis had built a protection relationship with Paul Hardy, who dealt drugs in the Florida housing project. When another officer warned him that Hardy was a “cold-blooded killer,” Davis reportedly answered that Hardy “ain’t never killed nobody that didn’t deserve to die.” Davis also admitted using his badge to help relatives traffic drugs, recruiting other NOPD officers to guard warehouses and escort couriers in exchange for a cut. Prosecutors later noted that the Florida project recorded twenty-three homicides in 1994 and only four in 1995, after Davis and Hardy were arrested.³

Federal Charges, Trial, and Death Sentence

Davis, Hardy, and Causey were arrested on December 5, 1994. Davis and eight other officers, including Williams, were also indicted on drug conspiracy charges from Operation Shattered Shield.⁵

By August 1995, a third superseding indictment charged Davis, Hardy, and Causey with three counts:

Conspiracy to deprive Groves of her civil rights while acting under color of law, under 18 U.S.C. § 241.
Depriving Groves of her civil rights through excessive force resulting in death, under 18 U.S.C. §§ 242 and 2.
Killing a witness to prevent communication about a federal crime, under 18 U.S.C. §§ 1512(a)(1)(C) and 2.

The government filed notices of intent to seek the death penalty in July 1995.³

The joint trial took place in April 1996 in the Eastern District of Louisiana. The FBI wiretaps were the heart of the case. Because Davis had used coded language, Williams testified for the government, interpreting the recordings and tying them to the events of October 13. Williams had pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy and received a five-year sentence. He was never prosecuted for his role in the murder, even though he admitted knowing about the plot all day and never warning Groves.⁶

The jury convicted Davis on all three counts and recommended death. The district court imposed the sentence on November 6, 1996. In a separate proceeding that December, Davis received life plus five years for the cocaine protection racket.² Davis and Hardy became the first people in American history condemned to death for federal civil rights violations.⁵

What Happened to the Co-Defendants

Paul Hardy, the shooter, was convicted on all three counts and sentenced to death. A federal judge later ruled that Hardy was intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution. On December 21, 2011, he was resentenced to mandatory life imprisonment.⁷

Damon Causey was convicted on the conspiracy and civil rights counts; the jury deadlocked on witness tampering. He was sentenced to life in prison, and in 2024 a federal court denied his motion for compassionate release.⁸

Appeals and the 2005 Resentencing

In 1999, the Fifth Circuit affirmed Davis’s convictions on the conspiracy and civil rights counts but reversed the witness-tampering conviction for insufficient evidence. Because the jury had issued one combined death recommendation across all three counts, the court vacated the death sentence and ordered resentencing.³

The resentencing began on July 25, 2005, before a new jury. Davis chose to represent himself with back-up counsel. On August 3, 2005, the jury found him eligible for the death penalty based on “substantial planning and premeditation,” concluded that aggravating factors outweighed mitigating factors, and recommended death. The district court reimposed the sentence on October 27, 2005.³

The Fifth Circuit affirmed in June 2010, rejecting Davis’s claims of prosecutorial misconduct and errors in jury instructions.³ Post-conviction motions alleging ineffective assistance of counsel were denied, and the Fifth Circuit declined to issue a certificate of appealability.⁹ The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari on every petition Davis filed, most recently on October 4, 2021.¹⁰

Biden’s Commutation and Davis’s Refusal

On December 23, 2024, President Biden commuted the death sentences of thirty-seven federal inmates, including Davis, converting them to life without the possibility of parole. Biden cited his opposition to federal executions and his refusal to let the incoming Trump administration resume them. The only federal death row inmates excluded were those convicted of terrorism or hate-motivated mass murder.¹¹

Davis, then sixty and incarcerated at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, refused to sign the commutation paperwork.¹² On December 30, 2024, he filed an emergency motion in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana seeking to block the commutation. Davis argued that keeping his death sentence preserved the “heightened scrutiny” courts apply to capital cases, which he believed was essential to his continuing effort to overturn his conviction. He also said the death sentence drew attention to what he called “overwhelming misconduct” by the Justice Department.¹³

Michael McMahon, the retired assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Davis, called the request to reinstate the death sentence a “delusional belief” that keeping execution on the table would help Davis win exoneration.¹¹ U.S. District Judge James Sweeney denied the motion, ruling that Davis had “no likelihood of success” and that the power to commute is the “ultimate authority” of the executive branch. Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, a commutation does not require the inmate’s consent.¹⁴ Davis is now serving life without parole.

The Groves Family

Groves’s murder left three children without a mother. Her youngest, Jasmine, was twelve. The family filed a civil lawsuit against the City of New Orleans in October 1995. In April 2018, nearly twenty-three years later, the city agreed to a $1.5 million settlement to be paid over four years. City officials described the agreement as part of an effort to close what they called a “dark and shameful chapter” in the department’s history.¹⁵

Jasmine Groves became a police accountability advocate. She serves as president of Families Overcoming Injustice and has worked with New Orleans for Community Oversight of Police on civilian oversight of the NOPD. For thirty years she organized annual memorial services for her mother; in October 2024, she held the final memorial and said she would focus on Supreme Mothers of Joy, a nonprofit she co-founded to support single parents.¹⁶ Her brother, Corey Groves, testified during Hardy’s 2011 resentencing that he had once been so consumed by rage he “desperately wanted to get stopped by an NOPD officer so that I could either kill one of them or force one of them to kill me.”¹⁵

1
FindLaw. United States v. Davis
2
Human Rights Watch. Shielded From Justice: Police Brutality in the United States
3
U.S. Department of Justice. United States v. Davis, Fifth Circuit Opinion
4
ACLU of Louisiana. My Mother Was Killed by a Police Officer on the Eve of My 13th Birthday
5
The Atavist Magazine. The Last Shall Be First
6
U.S. Supreme Court. Davis v. United States, Petition for Writ of Certiorari
7
U.S. Department of Justice. Paul Hardy Sentenced to Life in Prison
8
CaseMine. United States v. Causey
9
U.S. Supreme Court. Davis v. United States, Brief for the United States in Opposition
10
U.S. Supreme Court. Docket No. 20-7553
11
The Guardian. Biden Len Davis Death Row
12
Fox 8 Live. Biden Commutes Sentence of Former NOPD Officer Convicted in Conspiracy Murder
13
NBC News. Two Death Row Inmates Reject Biden’s Commutation to Life Sentences
14
NOLA.com. Ex-NOPD Officer Len Davis Must Leave Death Row, Judge Rules
15
NOLA.com. City to Pay $1.5M to Kim Groves’ Children
16
Verite News. Kim Groves Len Davis Murder NOPD Jasmine