![]() * And for shooting Gurley, he was charged with second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, second-degree assault, and reckless endangerment.īefore Liang killed Gurley, about six months after Garner died in 2014, the New York Daily News reported that in 15 years, and in at least 179 NYPD officer-involved deaths, only three officers had ever been indicted. For failing to try to save Gurley’s life, Liang would be charged with official misconduct. ![]() Instead, Butler took instructions from an operator over the phone. (Liang later said he didn’t know he’d shot anyone.) When Landau and Liang returned, neither offered to perform CPR. Liang’s partner, Shaun Landau, said Liang seemed most concerned about losing his job. ![]() After Liang fired, Gurley was left on the ground bleeding from his chest, while Liang and his partner walked back into the hallway to debate who would report the shot. Gurley and his girlfriend, Melissa Butler, had just walked into the stairwell a flight below. And the gun just went off after I tensed up.” “It was a quick sound and it just startled me. In the dark, Liang said a loud noise surprised him. Liang’s defense called the building notorious among officers for crime, and said that’s why as he opened the door to the stairwell, Liang drew his gun, his finger off the trigger. In November 2014, he and his partner, another recent graduate, patrolled the eighth floor of the Louis H. Liang had graduated from the police academy the year before the shooting. That contrast raised a question-was Liang’s conviction evidence of increased accountability, of racial bias, or of both? A camera recorded everything, but even then the officer never faced a jury. In that case, a white officer jumped on Garner’s back and choked him as Garner yelled 11 times those now famous words, “I can’t breathe!” Garner had done little more than argue with officers, and a chokehold was outlawed by police guidelines. Take the case of Eric Garner, the protesters argued. Liang was a minority scapegoat, they said, sacrificed to a nation incensed by officers killing black men. “As a former prosecutor and an academic who has been writing about police killings since the late ’90s, I see this case as the one least likely to result in conviction under normal circumstances,” Delores Jones-Brown, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, wrote me in an email.Ī week after the conviction, thousands of protesters said they knew why jurors found Liang guilty: He’s Asian. “And if he was, they would have acquitted him.” Department of Justice deputy assistant attorney. “Ten years ago, he wouldn’t have been prosecuted,” said Stephen Saltzburg, a professor at George Washington University Law School, and former U.S. Convictions of officers are usually restricted to extreme circumstances like this, which makes Liang’s case all the more surprising. The officer was disguised as a postal worker, and, seeing a mailman with a gun, Zongo ran and was killed. The last time it happened was in 2005, with the death of Ousmane Zongo, a West African immigrant shot in a warehouse during a raid on a counterfeit CD operation. It takes a lot to indict and convict an officer in New York. His finger twitched, leading to what Liang’s lawyers called “a tragic accident.” Liang’s defense had been that he kept his finger off the trigger, but that in the dark stairwell a loud sound surprised him. While on a routine patrol of the Brooklyn public housing building with his partner, Liang said he drew his gun for safety. Liang was the officer who killed Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old father, for no reason but that Gurley had walked into a dark stairwell. They wanted to feel its weight in their hands, to jerk its trigger, as he said he had, before deciding the officer’s guilt. ![]() At the trial of Peter Liang, the jurors kept returning to the 11.5-pound trigger of his New York Police Department standard-issue 9mm Glock. ![]()
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