In the Nichols Nichols case, a jury outside the city heard a well-known police defense

Even before the state’s trial started last month for the former police officers who were responsible for the fatal beating of tires Nichols in Memphis, the defense achieved an important victory.

De advocaten van de officieren hebben de rechter overgehaald om een ​​​​jury uit het gebied rond Chattanooga, Tenn., Honderden kilometers van waar surveillance- en lichaamscamera’s de officieren van de officieren te veroveren, de heer Nichols, een 29-jarige zwarte man, in januari 2023, honderden memphis, zeiden, zeiden dat de officieren zich konden overwegen, een 29-jarige zwarte man, in januari 2023. Tadarrus Bean, Demetrius Haley and Justin Smith – went on trial.

After the trial began, the lawyers took turns in turn for the violence to two other officers involved that night, but were not justified after they were guilty. They also often reminded the jury of how dangerous police work can be, and how their training sometimes makes power possible for certain types of strength.

“These agents serve in the most dangerous unity in the most dangerous city in the United States,” said Martin Zummach, a lawyer for Mr. Smith, who noticed the high crime percentage in Memphis. He later described the officers as “doing a job that none of us should put here in the guts to keep us safe.”

All those tactics are part of the playbook for defending police officers accused of excessive violence and, some experts said, probably incorporated in the unanimous acquittal on all the charges for all three defendants on Wednesday.

“The reason that they are fairly standard, the reason we have that playbook is because it works,” said Seth Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, although he added that the verb “hell out of me” because of the violence that was recorded on video.

Mr. Stoughton also noted that “there is a huge difference between society that says:” We endorse the actions of the officers in this case “and society say:” We do not have sufficient evidence of feelings of guilt here. “

The killing of Mr. Nichols is one of the highest profile issues that prosecutors have established police officers in the five years since the Murder of George Floyd. All charged officers are black.

All three officers were found guilty of witnesses who were tampered with a separate federal process last fall, and Mr Haley was found guilty of a lesser accusation of the violation of the civil rights of Mr Nichols caused by physical injury. However, they were all acquitted about the most serious accusation of civil rights to violate his civil rights by causing his death.

But the acquittal on Wednesday on a range of state costs, including second -degree murder, contributes to A mixed record From convictions, acquittal and at least one mistrial for police officers and care providers since the death of Mr. Floyd.

For many in Memphis, a city of more than 600,000 where more than a third of the black inhabitants of Tennessee live, the acquittal was a major outcome that contradicted what they saw on video.

“Those people were allowed to come here, look at the evidence and deny the evidence,” said Rowvaughn Wells, Mrs. Nichols’ mother, flanked by an emotional crowd that was collected outside the Memphis Museum on Thursday that says Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. She added: “They failed my son.”

Some police experts said it demonstrated how likely a jury is to give leeway to law enforcement figures and the group of a second calculations that they sometimes have to make in a job with high risks. In order to prove the charges without reasonable doubt, public prosecutors not only had to show that the violence took place, but that it was illegal, Mr Stoughton said.

Jury members also had to struggle with the well -known question how much deadly power is justified when it is framed as a matter of the safety of an officer. Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist and professor at the University of Texas in Austin, said that although it is not unconstitutional for police officers to assume that someone will harm them, this can lead to behavior and justification of certain actions that are.

The lawyers of the defense were Mr Nichols as a strong person who could keep the officers and noticed that he ran from them at a certain moment after he had stopped driving fast. They also pointed to stolen maps and small amounts of marijuana and psilocybin mushroom that they said they were found in his car after the beating.

Another factor that helped the defense was that the other two former officers involved in the mistreatment, Desmond Mills Jr. and Emmitt Martin III, were not justified. Both argue guilty in the federal case; Mr. Mills also pleaded guilty in the state shop and testified as part of his deal with the State.

It is unclear how Mr Martin’s state case will be dealt with; His lawyer did not respond to several requests for comments and public prosecutors said they would wait for the federal conviction to decide their next step.

Public Prosecutors acknowledged that the absence of Mr Mills and Mr Martin of the Row offered the defendants the opportunity for defenders’ lawyers to make it easier for their clients to reveal legal culpability. On the Video images of the incidentMr. Martin pulled Mr Nichols out of his car and then, after Mr. Nichols broke and was caught by officers, kicked and hit him repeatedly.

Mr. Mills, who appeared after Mr. Nichols near his mother’s house was trapped, hit him several times with a stick.

“Because two of the most culpable of the five defendants were assigned in the federal court and were not present in the trial of the Constitutional Court, I think there was a structural challenge,” said Steven J. Mulroy, the public prosecutor for Shelby County, Thursday in an interview. “I still think there was more than enough evidence to condemn.”

He added: “I think we will have a long way to understand the nature of the duty to intervene.”

In Memphis, it also did not go unnoticed that the state jury was predominantly white.

“One of the new experiences I have had, sitting in that courtroom, is looking at a completely white jury attraction to humanize three black men in a murder process that were defendants,” Dr. Earle Fisher, the senior pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Memphis. “And they only did it because they were police officers.”

The reaction in Memphis was fast when Mr. Nichols died three days after beating, of blunt strength injuries against his head. The elite police unit to which the officers belonged was dissolved Less than a month After beating. Last year an investigation into civil rights from the Ministry of Justice found a pattern of unfair treatment towards black people by the police.

Chief Cerelyn Davis from the Memphis Police Department said on Wednesday in a video report that “we believe in improved police, in training and in implementation that we see every day.”

But the legislative power of Tennessee, dominated by the Republicans, has destroyed some of the changes that the Memphis municipal council has approved in the aftermath.

President Trump signed at the end of last month An executive order that instructs its administration To provide legal aid to officers who are accused of misconduct. And already in his second term, There has been an exodus of the Civil Rights division from the Ministry of Justice, which continued the federal case against the officers.

The department ordered one Immediately stop for all new investigation into civil rights Shortly after Mr. Trump took office, as well as a break about negotiating so -called consent decisions, which serve as legally binding improvement plans for police services.

Before Mr. Trump TRAPDED, MEMPHIS CITY Civil servants had refused to enter into such an agreement With the government, saying that it would be labor -intensive and expensive.

Some residents of Memphis saw the judgment as proof of a shift in the attitude of the country in relation to police and racial inequality.

“The legal system does not seem to work so well at the moment,” said Demarcus Gatlin, 48, a veteran of the National Guard of Disabled.

“This has been going on for a long time,” said Mr. Gatlin and added, “Sooner or later this will happen again.”