On Tuesday, Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun in Brooklyn, New York, sentenced ex-Officer Peter Liang to five years of probation and 800 hours of community service for the death of 28-year-old African-American Akai Gurley.
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Liang was patrolling inside a public housing project when he opened the stairwell door and fired once. The ex-NYPD cop shot and killed the unarmed Akai Gurley at a NY housing project when he was still a police officer.
Despite appealing the sentence and reduction of conviction that Liang received from the judge, DA Thompson acknowledged that Peter Liang had no criminal history and posed no additional public safety threat. Peter Liang was sentenced to community service and probation in the shooting of Akai Gurley in Brooklyn. The shot was accidental.
Mr. Thompson had successfully tried Mr. Liang for second-degree manslaughter-defined as killing another person through recklessness.
As his fate was decided, Liang sat silently, a blank stare on his face.
He added that he wanted to be a police officer from a very young age. My life has forever changed.
But Gurley’s girlfriend, Melissa Butler, who was with him when he was killed, addressed Liang in an emotional victim-impact statement, saying, “You took a piece of me, you took a piece of my heart”. “I love my wife and family for supporting me, I want them to be proud of me”. But the prosecutors have said that Liang acted recklessly, and did not make any effort to help Gurley after the shooting.
Liang faced a possible sentence of up to 15 years in prison for manslaughter.
“Eight hundred hours of community service?” Gurley’s mother Sylvia Palmer released a statement which read in part, “This system and its agents should no longer claim to be about justice because they only produce injustice, they do not value Black lives with their actions”. “That’s like the charges you get for tagging up a wall!”
In the crowds that gathered outside court, there was a resounding sense that the ultimate fate of Peter Liang had long before been determined.
The United States has been gripped by protests denouncing police tactics since the high-profile deaths of two other unarmed black men at the hands of law enforcement in the summer of 2014.
“From Anthony Baez, to Ramarley Graham”, Sanchez continued, ticking off the names of men of color killed by the NYPD.
Police-reform advocates, however, praised Liang’s February conviction as the first time in more than a decade that an NYPD officer had been found guilty of killing a citizen. It’s reported Chinese-American activists even organized their own protests, claiming Liang was serving as a scapegoat for police misconduct.
“You think this is a joke?” one demonstrator asked the officer, angrily, from behind a barricade. “It was a dream come true when I graduated the police academy”.
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The kind of commotion at Liang’s sentencing is seen only every few years, a court officer who did not give his name said.
