Mistrial declared in case of S.C. officer who shot Walter Scott after traffic stop

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The jury has deadlocked in the case of a South Carolina police officer charged with murder after he was recorded on video last year firing a barrage of bullets at a fleeing motorist’s back.

“We as the jury regret to inform the court that despite the best efforts of all members, we are unable to come to a unanimous decision,” the jury wrote in a note Circuit Court Judge Clifton Newman read aloud in the case.

Newman declared a mistrial on Monday, shortly before 3:40 p.m., and thanked the jurors for their “hard work in trying to reach a unanimous verdict in this case.”

The deadlock came more than a year after Michael Slager, a white police officer, was charged with murder and fired after graphic video emerged showing him shooting Walter Scott, a black motorist, as the 50-year-old was running away.

This recording, captured by a bystander, spread quickly across news stations and the Internet, propelled into the public consciousness during a wave of scrutiny and protests nationwide focusing on how police use deadly force. Slager became the rare officer charged for an on-duty shooting, and the case continued to draw national attention as it stretched into December.

Slager, who said he feared for his life during the encounter, was charged remarkably quickly amid a shifting climate sparked by protests in Ferguson, Mo., just months before Scott’s death. After local officials announced the charges and vowed reforms in an attempt to reassure the public, a local activist said they didn’t want the city to become “another Ferguson.”

The officer pulled Scott over in April 2015 for a traffic stop, and in footage recorded by Slager’s dashboard camera, the two men briefly interact before Scott runs away and out of view. Over the police radio, Slager can be heard calling in a description of Scott before yelling, “Taser, Taser, Taser!”

Far more widely seen was the recording captured by a bystander, video showing Scott again fleeing after a phyiscal encounter with Slager. In this video, Scott can be seen running away as the officer takes aim and fires. Slager’s trial effectively put his word against that video footage, contrasting the images shared around the world with an officer’s description of his own fear and what he said happened before the recording began.

“I was scared,” Slager said during the trial, holding back tears. He described feeling “total fear that Mr. Scott was coming toward me.”

The video showed Scott’s back to the officer as he fired the fatal shots. Slager said that while he tried to subdue Scott, the driver had grabbed the Taser during a struggle over the device.

Speaking on the witness stand, Slager was asked by a prosecutor if he agreed that Scott was unarmed and running away. He said he did not realize the Taser had dropped behind him when he fired. “At the time,” Slager responded, “I would say no. But after watching the video, yes.”

Officers are infrequently charged for deadly on-duty shootings, and convictions in such cases are even less common. There have been thousands of police shootings since 2005, and during that same span 78 offiers have been charged with murder or manslaughter, according to Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who studies arrests of officers.

The jury in Slager’s trial began deliberating on Wednesday, the same day authorities said a Charlotte police officer would not face charges for fatally shooting a man there in September. Last month, a Minnesota police officer was charged with manslaughter for shooting Philando Castile over the summer, while prosecutors in Ohio said they would retry a former campus police officer in Cincinnati after a mistrial was declared.

In all of these cases, video footage — some of which captured the shootings, while others captured the aftermath or reactions from loved ones — played a key role in both the investigations and the public outcries that followed. The recording from Cincinnati, much like the one in North Charleston, appeared to contradict the officer’s account.

Slager — who also faces a federal civil rights charge for the shooting — was charged by the state with murder last year, but the judge agreed this week to let the jurors also consider manslaughter, a lesser charge with a lighter sentence.

Under South Carolina law, murder is defined as killing a person “with malice aforethought, either express or implied” and must be punished with between 30 years in prison or life imprisonment in cases, like this one, where the death penalty is not being sought. Manslaughter, defined as killing “without malice, express or implied,” carries with it a sentence of between two and 30 years.

In Minnesota, prosecutors last month said they opted for a second-degree manslaughter charge for the officer who shot Castile because it was “the highest, most provable offense.” The prosecutor in Ohio who decided to retry Raymond Tensing, the former officer who shot and killed Samuel DuBose during a traffic stop in Cincinnati last year, said jurors were leaning toward convicting that officer of voluntary manslaughter and acquitting him on the murder charge. He still opted to retry him on both counts.

Scott and DuBose were among 991 people fatally shot by police last year, according to a Washington Post database tracking such deaths. Shootings by police were up at the midway point of this year and police are currently on pace to fatally shoot about the same number of people this year.

In a year-long study, The Washington Post found that the types of incidents that sparked protests across the country — usually white officers killing unarmed black men or boys — represented less than 4 percent of fatal shootings. More than 7 in 10 of the people shot were wielding a gun or a knife.

More officers have been charged during the recent years roiled by demonstrations and calls for reform. Video evidence, available in an era of widespread police cameras and ubiquitous civilian smartphones, has increasingly been a factor in those cases.

Fewer officers were killed by suspects last year than in 2014, but that number has increased this year, reaching 62 officers shot and killed through the first 11 months of the year — up from 38 such deaths last year. Police officers say they are increasingly anxious in the era of smartphones and protests, and after ambush killings of officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, some in law enforcement call this a uniquely difficult and dangerous time for policing.

During his trial, Slager described his own regrets from the shooting, saying that in hindsight, he would have called for backup and not chased Scott.

The former officer was in custody when his son was born, and while locked up he was held near Dylann Roof, the 22-year-old charged with killing nine black parishioners in a Charleston church last year and on trial at the same time as Slager.

“My family has been destroyed by this,” Slager said. “The Scott family’s been destroyed by this. It’s horrible.”

(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Mark Berman

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