GUILTY NY - Akai Gurley, 28, fatally shot by NYPD officer, Brooklyn, 20 Nov 2014

MsFacetious

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A New York City police officer has been indicted in the death of Akai Gurley, an unarmed man shot and killed in a Brooklyn housing project in November, a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation has told CNN.

The charges against Officer Peter Liang were not revealed Tuesday.

Gurley, 28, was "a total innocent who just happened" to run into Liang in a "pitch black" stairwell at the Louis H. Pink Houses in Brooklyn, New York Police Commissioner William Bratton told reporters the day after the killing.

At the time, the NYPD said the fatal shot was an "accidental discharge."


---------------------------------

The officers had taken an elevator to the building's top floor to check on the roof and were taking the stairs down from the 8th floor, Bratton said, when the officer discharged the weapon. There were no lights in the stairwell leading up to the roof.

Liang drew a flashlight and his weapon "for safety reasons," the police commissioner said. The other officer did not draw his gun.

In the darkened stairwell, Liang's gun discharged about the same time that Gurley, the father of a 2-year-old child, and his girlfriend were entering the seventh-floor landing, Bratton said. Shot once in the chest, Gurley died at a hospital.

The lights on the seventh and eighth floors were not working, Bratton said.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/10/us/new-york-gurley-shooting-indictment/index.html
 
Cop involved in fatal shooting of Akai Gurley has been indicted on manslaughter charges: source

A source said Liang, 27, was indicted for a top count second-degree manslaughter, which means he acted recklessly. He was also charged with reckless endangerment, second-degree assault and official misconduct, another source said.

and The probationary officer, who’s been on the force for less than 18 months, was allegedly holding a flashlight in one hand and clutched a 9-mm Glock in his left hand, which he also used to open a door when the gun fired.

The News reported that Liang and his partner did not answer the radio in the six-plus minutes right after the shooting and instead texted their union delegates.


The gun didn't fire. He pulled the trigger. The language choice is interesting. I'm very glad the cop was indicted as this case was pretty ridiculous.
 
Cop involved in fatal shooting of Akai Gurley has been indicted on manslaughter charges: source

A source said Liang, 27, was indicted for a top count second-degree manslaughter, which means he acted recklessly. He was also charged with reckless endangerment, second-degree assault and official misconduct, another source said.

and The probationary officer, who’s been on the force for less than 18 months, was allegedly holding a flashlight in one hand and clutched a 9-mm Glock in his left hand, which he also used to open a door when the gun fired.

The News reported that Liang and his partner did not answer the radio in the six-plus minutes right after the shooting and instead texted their union delegates.


The gun didn't fire. He pulled the trigger. The language choice is interesting. I'm very glad the cop was indicted as this case was pretty ridiculous.

Good.
 
I totally agree with this indictment. (Don't be too shocked. :wink: )

I knew this would most likely be the outcome from the first time I read about this case.
 
I was actually pretty surprised they indicted him.
I agree it was reckless. He's just lucky he didn't kill a toddler as well or instead. :twocents:
 
NYPD officers argued about calling supervisor after shooting of Akai Gurley

Officers Peter Liang and Shaun Landau did nothing to help dying man
‘Accidental fire’ only reported 20 minutes later, court documents reveal


The two stood in the hallway and argued for several minutes about who should call their supervisor to report the gunshot and what phone should be used.

“You call,” Liang told his partner.

“No, you call,” Landau said.

But no one called. Instead, Landau went into the stairwell, searching the walls for bullet holes, but soon heard a “grunting noise” coming from the floors below. When he reached the fifth floor, he saw Gurley’s body and Butler kneeling over him, tears pouring down her face.

By then, Butler was on the phone with a 911 operator, who was trying to walk her through performing CPR as the officers stood nearby.

“Neither defendant nor Officer Landau provided any medical care to Mr Gurley. Nor did they summon an ambulance,” prosecutors wrote in the court filing. Instead, the two of them walked around Gurley’s body to the landing on the fourth floor.

It was nearly 20 minutes after the shooting when the officers radioed to report “an accidental fire”.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...rgued-calling-supervisor-shooting-akai-gurley
 
Wow - seems to me that the partner should be charged with something as well.
 
Cop Accused of Fatally Shooting Unarmed Black Man May Have Had Defective Gun, Lawyers Say

Robert E. Brown, a former New York Police Department (NYPD) captain who took over as one of Liang's attorneys in November, told NBC News that contrary to some media reports last December, Liang neither texted nor called his Patrolmen's Benevolent Association of New York City union delegate instead of summoning an ambulance as 28-year-old Akai Gurley lay dying in a darkened stairwell of the Louis H. Pink Houses in Brooklyn.

Brown also said that, in his view, it was reasonable for Liang to have had his weapon drawn while patrolling the stairwell, and that his firearm may have discharged because of a defect.
...
In addition, Brown raised the possibility that the trigger spring on Liang's gun may have been "defectively installed." He said that a Glock 9-mm handgun requires 12 pounds of pressure to activate the trigger, but that according to a ballistics report, Liang's weapon needed only 11.5 pounds.

"If the trigger wasn't defective, the gun would not have discharged," he said. Brown said he also plans to hire an expert to look into this.

Lots more at link.
 
EXCLUSIVE: Officer Peter Liang's lawyers may gamble on jury trial in Akai Gurley shooting

The attorneys for Officer Peter Liang may allow a jury, not a judge, to determine whether his behavior leading to the death of Akai Gurley was criminally reckless, the Daily News has learned.

Last month, Liang's family hired Robert Brown and Rae Koshetz with money raised by the community for his defense fund.

"After hearings that will focus on suppressing statements and the weapon, we will start jury selection," Brown confirmed.
...
The judge was "shocked" when Brown and Koshetz said they wanted to have jury selection and not a bench trial, the source said.

"We won't know if we have an unbiased panel until we start questioning them. We want to see first if the panel can be fair with this amount of publicity," said Brown.
 
Officer Peter Liang Opts for Jury Trial in Killing of Akai Gurley

It begins January 21st.

Officer Peter Liang, who is accused of fatally shooting unarmed Akai Gurley in a housing project staircase, will have his fate decided by a Brooklyn jury instead of a Supreme Court judge, DNAinfo New York has learned.

“We have great confidence in 12 jurors and are unshaken in our belief that this case was a terrible accident that never fit the definition of manslaughter and should never have led to an indictment,”

"If we can get a jury that is willing to listen and consider this, I believe we can prevail," she said.

She's probably right.
 
A jury acquitted the cops that murdered Kelly Thomas, so I would guess this one will be as well.
 
What took them so long. IMO

In other indictment news,Brian Encinia (Bland case) was indicted for perjury on his traffic stop.
Trying to sneak it in as I don't know if it would be okay to start a thread.
 
What took them so long. IMO

In other indictment news,Brian Encinia (Bland case) was indicted for perjury on his traffic stop.
Trying to sneak it in as I don't know if it would be okay to start a thread.

I don't know either, but thank you for the update.
(Indicted AND fired! Okay.. sorry.)
 
The attorneys saying the gun was defective sounds ludicrous to me - in post #8. Jmo.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/n...s-scrutinized-at-manslaughter-trial.html?_r=0

A New York City police lieutenant who arrived at a housing project in Brooklyn where a man had been shot by a police officer said he had found the officer, Peter Liang, “frozen” on a fourth-floor landing. One level above him lay the man, Akai Gurley, mortally wounded and sprawled on the floor, said the lieutenant, Vitaliy Zelikov, who testified on Thursday at Officer Liang’s trial in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn...

In opening statements, Marc Fliedner, an assistant prosecutor in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, said Officer Liang had violated numerous police procedures during the encounter, including failing to aid Mr. Gurley by not performing CPR even though he had been trained and required to do so.

Rae Downes Koshetz, a lawyer for Officer Liang, presented a different argument: Officer Liang, who had graduated from the Police Academy the December before the shooting, was rendered unable to act by the shock of what he had done.
 
Officer Peter Liang convicted of manslaughter

A New York City police officer who shot an unarmed man in a pitch-dark public housing stairway has been convicted of manslaughter. Jurors delivered their verdict Thursday in Officer Peter Liang's (lee-ANGZ) trial.
(...)
Prosecutors said Liang handled his gun recklessly and did almost nothing to help Gurley.

The 28-year-old Liang said he fired by accident after a noise startled him. He acknowledged not helping Gurley's girlfriend try to revive him, but Liang explained he thought it was wiser to wait for professional medical aid.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/0cec...st-cop-guilty-manslaughter-stairwell-shooting
 
Thanks for everybody that has posted updates on this case. I think the jury came to the right decision. I just don't get how a cop can accidentally shoot somebody and not do all they can to help that person. He's either a terrible person or he's lying about it being an accident IMO.
 

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