
Police Officer’s Killer Calls Tuscaloosa Jail Inhumane After 5 Years With No Trial
A man who killed a Tuscaloosa Police investigator more than five years ago says he's being subjected to inhumane treatment in the Tuscaloosa County Jail and continues to plead for a transfer or trial.
The TPD officer, Investigator Dornell Cousette, was fatally wounded during a September 2019 gunfight with then-20-year-old Luther Bernard Watkins.
Police have said Cousette was seeking to arrest Watkins on outstanding warrants and the two exchanged gunfire. Both were injured, but Cousette did not survive. The wounded Watkins was found quickly, treated medically, then charged with capital murder and placed in the Tuscaloosa County Jail, where he has now been held without bond for more than five years.
Over 1,800 days have come and gone since his arrest, but Watkins has not pleaded guilty or been convicted at a jury trial. Thanks to turnover on his legal team, the COVID pandemic and a massive felony backlog facing the Tuscaloosa County District Attorney's office, he simply remains jailed.
Circuit Judge Brad Almond is overseeing the case and he once estimated the trial could begin in early 2023 - that obviously didn't happen.

That hearing, requested in April 2023, has not been held.
After several recent changes to his defense attorneys, Watkins has filed a flurry of new motions, including an August request to be transferred to another jail facility and a separate motion for a speedy trial.
In a September letter, Watkins pleaded with Almond to make some progress in moving this case along. The excerpts below have not been corrected for spelling or grammar.
"Dear honorable Judge, I am writing you in hopes you answer the pending outstanding motions me and my legal team have put in," Watkins handwrote on lined paper, noting that some motions have been left unaddressed for around two years. "I've been incarcerated for five years and is being subject to oppressive confinement due to the infamy I've gain from the alleged charge. I've been trying to change my jail for years, but my legal team finally put in a motion for this to happen. Again we are waiting on you to answer that motion as well."
Watkins told the judge that he didn't want to come off as making demands or rushing Almond, but said the last five years have been inhumane. He said most of the jail guards knew Cousette or his brother, Juan Hall, who was himself a detention officer at the jail before he died last December in a bizarre gunfight with a Birmingham firefighter.
"The high-ranking officers just ordered me to be placed in a one-man cell for four months without an hour out my room, having me in a cell 24 hours with no recreation time to relief my mental," Watkins wrote. "Now that they let me out due to me saying something about the unlawful situation, every other day the officers are running in my cell, searching, sometimes waking me up at 2 a.m. out my sleep which they don't do to anyone else in this jail."
Finally, Watkins claims conditions inside the Tuscaloosa County Jail, his home for the last five years, are not good.
"As you probably know this jail is over capacity, the rooms supposed to have two people in a cell but right now there are four, some maybe five," he wrote. "This is inhumane because you have inmates sleeping by the urinal when other inmates have to use it on top of them."
"I just hope you rule on the motions to move my jail. I've been here five year," Watkins wrote in the letter. "During my stay one of the officers have assaulted me and one of the doctors did a surgery on me inside the jail wrongly. Nobody should have to live like this. Please think deeply about my letter. Thanks for your time."
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