man who was running away from the officer after a traffic stop.
The shooting
April 4 was captured on video by a bystander and showed officer Michael
Slager firing eight times as 50-year-old Walter Scott ran away. The
shooting rekindled an ongoing national debate about the treatment of
black suspects at the hands of white officers.
Slager was charged
with murder by state law enforcement agents almost immediately after the
video surfaced. Prosecutor Scarlett Wilson announced the indictment.
"The jury will make up its own mind after it sees the video and hears the other testimony," Wilson said of Slager's trial.
No trial date has been set.
Wilson
said the state law enforcement agents had the video and could have
shown it to the grand jury, but she is not sure if they did. In South
Carolina, the investigating agency typically presents the case to a
grand jury, not the prosecutor.
Wilson said earlier the death
penalty does not seem to apply because there were no aggravating
circumstances such as robbery or kidnapping as required under South
Carolina law.
The 33-year-old Slager faces 30 years to life in prison if convicted. He has been jailed without bond since his arrest.
Slager
told authorities that he fired his Taser at Scott as he ran, but the
stun gun didn't work. Then during a scuffle over the weapon, Slager
said, he shot Scott with his handgun in self-defense. The video appeared
to show the men briefly scuffling in a vacant lot, but it also shows
Scott clearly running away when the officer starts firing his handgun.
Family
members have said Scott may have started running after the traffic stop
because he was fearful of returning to jail over about $18,000 he owed
in late child-support payments.
As
word of the shooting spread, many feared police would close the case
without taking any action against the officer. But days later, the video
shot by a man walking to work surfaced, and Slager was arrested, easing
tensions in the community.
The
cellphone video added fuel to the national debate about race and
aggressive police tactics that intensified in August with the shooting
death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In that case, there was no
video of the shooting and Officer Darren Wilson was not indicted.
In
Baltimore, six officers were indicted in the death of Freddie Gray, who
was critically injured during an arrest there and later died at a
hospital.
In South Carolina,
prosecutors have sought felony charges against Slager and two other
officers in the past year for shooting at unarmed black men following
traffic stops. Two of the men were killed, while a third was seriously
injured.
Source:AP
No comments:
Post a Comment