Welcome To aBlackWeb

Register

Breaking News Ex-Cop Roy Oliver found guilty of murder of Jordan Edwards

TheMadLionsFan

TheMadLionsFan

Out chea thuggin in my home office.
Ex-officer Roy Oliver guilty of murder for killing Jordan Edwards
Jury convicts white former Texas police officer who shot and killed 15-year-old African American in April 2017.

4 hours ago
1cd055a2f2b545edb4a4c6b07a2f80fe_18.jpg

[File: Handout/Parker County Sheriff''s Office via AP/Rose Baca/AP Photo] [Daylife]

A Texas jury has found a white former police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager last year guilty of murder.

Roy Oliver shot into a car full of teenagers as they were leaving a party in the Dallas suburb of Balch Springs in April 2017.

Fifteen-year-old Jordan Edwards, who was sitting in the passenger seat, was struck and killed.

"It's been a hard year ... I'm just really happy," Edwards's father, Odell, told reporters at the courthouse after the verdict on Tuesday.

At the time of the shooting, Oliver claimed the vehicle was trying to run over his partner, but several witness accounts and body-cam footage showed the car was moving away from the officer.

Oliver was fired from the Balch Springs police force in May 2017 after police admitted the video of the shooting contradicted Oliver's initial statement.

Local reporters, who were present in the courtroom on Tuesday as the verdict was read, reported that there were hugs, claps and cheers from the family of Edwards.

Oliver faces between five and 99 years in prison for the murder. His sentencing hearing began immediately after the trial. The former police officer was acquitted of manslaughter and aggravated assault.

'Not just about Jordan'
Daryl Washington, Edwards's lawyer, said the verdict is not just about justice for the young teenager's family but for the families of all unarmed black people killed by police.

"This case is not just about Jordan," Washington told reporters. "It's about Tamir Rice, it's about Walter Scott, it's about Alton Sterling, it's about every unarmed African American who has been killed and who has not got justice."

According to Washington Post Fatal Force database, more than 980 people were killed by police in 2017.

eded9abf69464cf9853691aa36202d8b_18.jpg

Monica Tunstle-Garrett, left, of Mesquite, Texas, and Al Woolum, right of North Richland Hills, Texas, light candles as the arrive at a vigil for Jordan Edwards in Balch Springs, Texas, Thursday, May 4, 2017. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez) [Daylife]
The Guardian identified more than 1,090 police killings the previous year.

Nearly a quarter of those killed by police in 2016 were African Americans, although the group accounted for roughly 12 percent of the total US population.

According to watchdog group The Sentencing Project, African American men are six times more likely to be arrested than white men.

These disparities, particularly the killing of African Americans by police, has prompted the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, a popular civil rights movement aimed at ending police violence and dismantling structural racism.

'Finally'
Online, many called Tuesday's verdict a "small", but "significant" step for justice for unarmed people killed by police.

According to Phil Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University, only 91 police officers in the US have been charged with murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty shooting since 2005. Less than 40 have been convicted of a crime.

"This is a big deal," tweeted Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
368012b9261940529fe1079b10f95981_18.jpg

Odell Edwards, father of Jordan Edwards, gets a hug from Dallas County district attorney Faith Johnson after hearing a guilty of murder verdict [Rose Baca/The Dallas Morning News via AP] [Daylife]





Angie Thomas, author of the book The Hate You Give, and others pointed out that the verdict came on the same day as the anniversary murder of Emmet Till, a 14-year-old African American who was kidnapped and brutally killed in 1955 in Mississippi. Although two white men confessed to the murder after they were acquitted by an all-white jury, experts say details around the murder remain unclear. The US Department of Justice recently announced it was reviving its investigation into the case, which became a focal point of the civil rights movement in the US.

"It's not lost on me that Jordan Edwards received justice on the anniversary of Emmett Till's murder," Thomas tweeted. "Trying to process this."



 
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/us/jordan-edwards-sentence-shooting.html

Family of Jordan Edwards Says 15 Years Is Not Enough for Officer Who Murdered Him


Fifteen is a significant number for Jordan Edwards’s family. It’s how many years he lived before a police officer opened fire with a high-powered rifle as Jordan and four other teenagers drove away from a house party in the Dallas suburb of Balch Springs in April 2017.

Jordan, a high school freshman, was sitting in the front passenger seat when a bullet struck his head and killed him.

This week, the number gained a new meaning when the officer convicted in Jordan’s murder, Roy D. Oliver II, received a 15-year prison term. The prosecution was seeking at least 60 years.

“That was my exact thought: They gave a year for his age,” Jordan’s stepmother, Charmaine Edwards, said outside a Dallas County courtroom after the sentence was handed down on Wednesday. “He can actually see life again after 15 years, and that’s not enough because Jordan can’t see life again.”

The disappointment came just one day after the family felt some consolation in securing a rare conviction in a case where a white officer killed a black person.

“I would have been fine if he had got 30 years, or 25 years,” Ms. Edwards said in a phone interview on Thursday. “Anything over 15, I would have been satisfied. I just feel like 15 years is not nearly enough for the loss of a life, especially when you have people who commit smaller crimes and they get more years than that.”

In Texas, the vast majority of murder sentences are for more than 20 years, though Mr. Oliver’s lawyer, Bob Gill, said after the sentencing that longer prison terms are usually for “people who act out of malice or hatred.”

Standard police practices allow officers to use their discretion to shoot in situations when they believe they are in danger and jurors are inclined to believe police testimony, experts say. Police officers in Texas’ largest cities fatally shot 247 people between 2010-15, according to The Texas Tribune, and rarely faced charges. Until this week, it had been 45 years since a police officer in Dallas County had been convicted of murder. The previous officer received five years and served half of his sentence.

Ms. Edwards also acknowledged that before the start of the murder trial she was pessimistic about the prosecution’s chances, after watching police shooting cases like those involving Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castille, Clinton Allen, Alton Sterling, Terence Crutcher and others.

“If I have to be honest, I wasn’t looking for a conviction because quite naturally you’ve seen across the nation where this has happened so many times and no one is held accountable,” she said. “So I figured that it would be another one of these occasions where a police officer is not held accountable for his actions.”

Ms. Edwards, 35, said she thought of the many other families of police shooting victims.

“I’m them,” she said. “I was in their shoes just two weeks ago, sitting here wondering: Was I going to get a conviction?”

“So, of course, I totally feel the way they feel,” she added. “The only difference is that I see results from his death. My heart is with them because I know it still hurts and I know it hurts as a mother for them: To see a conviction for another black life lost and their child still didn’t get justice.”

One exception is Judy Scott, the mother of Walter Scott, an unarmed black motorist who was killed in North Charleston, S.C., in 2015 after a traffic stop. That case ended in a mistrial, but the officer, Michael T. Slager, pleaded guilty to a civil rights violation and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Next week in Chicago, Officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot the 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times in October 2014, is scheduled to go on trial. He is the first Chicago police officer in decades charged with murder for a fatal on-duty shooting.

In this week’s case in Dallas, 12 jurors, two of whom were black women, decided unanimously to convict. The county is about one-quarter black.

“One of the most powerful things about this verdict, beyond the fact that it is a verdict, is that it came with only two black women on that jury,” an Edwards family lawyer, Jasmine Crockett, said.

On the night of April 29, 2017, Mr. Oliver and his partner had been dispatched to a house in response to a complaint of underage drinking. Body camera footage showed Mr. Oliver firing his rifle into a car that was traveling away from him and his partner, Officer Tyler Gross. The car was carrying Jordan, his two brothers and two other teenagers.

Last week, Mr. Oliver testified that he had decided to fire at the car when he saw it moving toward Officer Gross, endangering him. But Officer Gross told the court that he had not feared for his life. His testimony and the body camera footage played critical roles in the rare trial outcome, observers say.

“The video helps to get us to first base, but I don’t know if that’s what got us the home run though,” Ms. Crockett said. “Time and time again, we’ll all look at the same video. And one side is saying, ‘This is what I see,’ and another side is saying, ‘That’s what I see.’”

Mr. Oliver’s defense lawyers have already begun the process of appealing, and the Edwards family is proceeding with a civil suit against Mr. Oliver and the city of Balch Springs.

“We are pleased that we got a verdict although we wanted a greater punishment,” said Daryl K. Washington, another lawyer for the Edwards family. “The jury sent a message to Dallas, to the State of Texas and the rest of this country that police brutality will not be accepted.”
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top