In the early hours of Nov. 12, 1989, Officer Luis Lazarde arrested two men outside a bar on Germantown Avenue.
Both men were taken to the hospital with head injuries that night.
The officers who transported the prisoners said they found one of them - Ventura Martinez Perez - bleeding when they arrived that night.
They said they saw Officer Lazarde strike the second prisoner - Victor Rodriguez. They also said Lazarde tried to get them to help cover up the incident.
Lazarde denied the accusations and said his fellow officers were framing him.
In April 1991, then-Police Commissioner Willie L. Williams announced that he was firing Lazarde for misconduct. Williams said he hoped the discipline - which came six weeks after the videotaped beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles - showed that Philadelphia was not Los Angeles and that the department could discipline its own officers.
Now, more than a year later, the opposite has occurred. The city has been ordered to reinstate Luis Lazarde as a police officer, even though the department, a labor arbitrator and a federal arbitration panel in a civil rights lawsuit all concluded he had engaged in acts of serious misconduct.
Lazarde since has acknowledged that a portion of his initial account to police - in which he denied knowing anything about Rodriguez's injury - was false. He still contended that he had not beaten the prisoners, and said he had been dishonest because he feared being fired.
The case raises questions not just about the conduct of an officer, but about how the department and the city responded to a misconduct complaint.
Central among them is why it took the city 17 months to decide to discipline Lazarde. The labor arbitrator ordered Lazarde reinstated because the city took so long to fire him. The city is appealing, so far without success.
The police union contends that Lazarde was fired only because he became a scapegoat after the Rodney King case.
The case comes amid public debate about the way the Internal Affairs Division handles complaints. A City Council panel began hearings last week on a bill, supported by several citizens' groups, that would create a police review board to oversee investigations of police misconduct.
