The special investigator hired by the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office has issued an eight-page report exonerating Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann for having killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice at a local rec center.
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A grand jury is set to determine whether criminal charges should be brought against Loehmann or his partner, Officer Frank Garmback, who was driving the police vehicle that surveillance video showed pulling within a few feet of Rice. Abady slammed the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s decision to release two expert reports, before a grand jury examined the case, that found the shooting by a police officer reasonable. “The officers are not talking, which is their right”, said Chandra, “but [the report] authors shouldn’t assume they were in fear”. The video, which includes the minutes leading up to the shooting, shows the bored 12-year-old, playing with a toy gun in a almost empty park on a cold and rainy November day.
McGinty’s office said he has no plans to step aside, and in a written response said the investigation will be thorough and that ultimately justice will be achieved. “We learn that later”, Sims told an interviewer last May. The Guardian reports that two months before he was asked to investigate, Sims went on television to explain why the shooting of the 12-year-old boy may be justified. It also came as the nation reeled from police-involved shootings of unarmed African-American men; Tamir was black.
Hernandez was driving a stolen auto at the time with four other teenagers inside.
“The unorthodox, if not unprecedented, use of expert reports at this stage of the criminal proceeding is all the more troubling because these reports are clearly created to exculpate the officers”, the Rice attorneys wrote in their letter to McGinty. The other teenagers say the officer was hit after Hernandez lost control of the auto after being shot. Rather, they have to look at the specifics of the expert, his or her track record and judgments, rather than making broad-brush arguments like those of Hands Up United. We can draw these inferences from the facts.
“The officers did not create the violent situation”, Sims wrote in his review.
“Any presentation to a grand jury – without the prosecutor advocating for Tamir – is a charade”, Chandra said. However, past comments about the shooting from the Denver prosecutor and a Department of Justice rejection of the Federal Bureau of Investigation agent’s work investigating a different shooting have raised doubts about their impartiality, said Case Western Reserve University law professor Michael Benza. “Both of these individuals had the advantage of being lawyers familiar with Supreme Court rulings in this area and of being teachers who taught at police training academies and professional seminars on the use of deadly force”.
The officer who shot Rice was a rookie who had poor performance reviews with a previous police department.
About two dozen activists, Rice family relatives, and attorneys gathered on the steps of the facility, calling for a new direction into the investigation of Rice’s death.
A Grand Jury decision to answering the controversial question that has split the community is getting closer.
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Walter Madison, another attorney representing the family told RT that the prosecutor produced the reports to “make opinion early to soften the blow”. “Yes or no. It’s a simple question”.
