Vanguard News Desk Editor
MEMPHIS, TN – Although a federal jury Thursday here found three former Memphis police officers not guilty of violating the civil rights of Tyre Nichols in his beating death, the accused were found guilty of federal witness tampering charges in the killing of the 29-year-old Black man who died three days after the violent beating.
One officer, Demetrius Haley, was convicted on a lesser charge of violating Nichols’s civil rights by causing bodily injury, wrote the New York Times late Thursday.
The verdict in the federal trial comes about two years after Nichols’s death, viewed, as the Times reported, “the latest example of a young Black man being subjected to excessive force at the hands of the police.”
“Though people might be inclined to believe we’ve turned the page on police immunity when it comes to police brutality, history would suggest otherwise,” said Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
“This is accountability, not justice,” he added. “Justice would be a system that doesn’t so reliably hurt the people that it’s meant to protect.”
Video of the January 2023 incident showed Nichols fleeing “a traffic stop, officers viciously punched and kicked him, ignoring his cries for his mother and his attempts to comply with a barrage of conflicting commands. None of the officers reported the extent of the beating,” said the Times.
The three accused and two other former officers who pleaded guilty to the attack face additional state charges, including second-degree murder.
Sentencing on the federal convictions is expected to occur in January. Former officers Tadarrius Bean and Justin Smith face up to 20 years in prison. The officers who pleaded guilty are also awaiting sentencing.
“You know what these officers did and know it because you saw it over and over again,” said Kathryn Gilbert, a Justice Department lawyer, in closing statements. “You can use your eyes. You can use your ears. You can use your common sense. You know what these officers did.”
The trial ran about 17 days, and, as the NY Times put it, “exposed a culture of secrecy and violence within the Memphis Police Department, where officers held to an unspoken agreement that they could punish anyone who fled from them and downplay the violence. The five officers — all of whom are Black — were part of a team within the specialized Scorpion street crime unit, where arrest statistics and confiscations were a priority.
“Our police forces should be diverse; they should not look like occupying forces. But you can’t concentrate on that without also focusing on accountability, supervision and improving the culture,” said Kami N. Chavis, a law professor at the College of William & Mary and director of the school’s criminal justice program, according to the Times.
Nichols, detailed the Times Thursday, was a FedEx worker who was the father of a young child driving home from work on Jan. 7, 2023, when he was stopped by the officers.
The Times added, “Yanked from his car, he faced a series of conflicting and aggressive commands and was hit with pepper spray and fired at with a stun gun before he broke away and ran toward his mother’s home.” He was stopped down the street from the house, where more officers arrived, punching and kicking him. Propped up against a police car, Nichols sat in the street for minutes without medical aid before an ambulance was called.”
Over the course of two weeks, federal prosecutors called former and current Memphis police officers to testify at trial.
Prosecutors “repeatedly played a compilation of body camera and surveillance footage, first released in the weeks after the traffic stop, that showed the beating,” Nichols’s “pained cries for his mother and some of the upbeat conversations that came after.”
“The most dramatic moments came when the two former officers who pleaded guilty to their roles in the violence took the stand, a requirement of their plea agreements with the federal government. As prosecutors played clips from body camera footage, the two men each paused to identify each voice and violation of their police training, while their three former colleagues sat across the room,” wrote the Times.
Former officer Desmond Mills Jr. sobbed on the stand after watching the videos of the men restraining Nichols’s arms, hitting him with a baton and winding up for a kick to his limp body.
“It hurt inside so much. I felt bad every time his picture is on the screen — to know I’m part of that,” Mr. Mills said. “I made his child fatherless,” he added. “I’m sorry.”
