A state jury found three former Memphis police officers not guilty of second-degree murder in the 2023 beating death of Tyre Nichols that helped galvanize a movement to reform police conduct.
The jurors deliberated for more than eight hours after listening to days of testimony that delved into the minutes after police pulled over Nichols for a traffic stop and when the 29-year-old FedEx worker was repeatedly hit and kicked by the officers.
The verdict is a blow for police reform advocates who hoped a guilty verdict would motivate support for their efforts. But supporters of the officers say that they were following police procedure and that the prosecution was driven by public outcry.
Prosecutors argued that the former officers had a duty to protect Nichols but became angry when he fled after being pulled over. Attorneys for the men warned jurors that a conviction would hurt law enforcement’s ability to aggressively pursue suspects in a violent city.
The officers hugged their attorneys and each other after the verdict was read. “Hallelujah, thank you, Jesus,” a family member of one of the former officers repeatedly shouted after leaving the courtroom.
“It is hard to represent a person when the media and the activists have spent so much time prejudging a man,” said Martin Zummach, who represented one of the officers, Justin Smith Jr. Smith is a good Christian, he said. “He is my friend and only just happens to be African American. It’s too bad that everything in Memphis is about race.”
All of the former officers involved in the beating are Black, as was Nichols.
On the evening of Jan. 7, 2023, Nichols was driving to his home in a nearly all-Black neighborhood in East Memphis when an officer noticed him speeding up to beat a red light. The officer didn’t find any warrants after running Nichols’s plates but decided to pull him over.
Nichols managed to run away after being pulled from his car and forced to the ground. Officers caught up to Nichols again less than 100 yards from his mother’s house. One pepper-sprayed Nichols and then beat him with his baton. Another kicked and punched him. This confrontation, which was captured by a police camera at the intersection, lasted a few minutes before officers picked up Nichols and laid him against a car. An additional 22 minutes passed before a stretcher was brought out for Nichols and he was taken to a hospital in critical condition.
He died in the hospital three days later.
“Today’s verdicts are a devastating miscarriage of justice,” Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci, who have represented Nichols’s family, said in a statement. “Let this be a rally cry: we must confront the broken systems that empowered this injustice.”
The verdicts come at a pivotal moment for police reform efforts. Advocates hoped the case would show that rogue officers could be held accountable, and they worried that an acquittal could stall their movement. Public support for overhauls sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police has waned significantly since 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. President Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of empowering officers to aggressively “clean up” American cities, and his Justice Department has essentially halted federal efforts to hold local police departments accountable.
“The verdict is not surprising to me in the sense that it’s extremely rare for officers to be charged with a crime, let alone to be convicted for killing anybody in the United States,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, executive director of Mapping Police Violence, which tracks cases of police use of force. “There’s almost no accountability from the criminal legal system when it comes to officers shooting and killing people.”
The three former officers were already found guilty of several federal charges, including excessive force resulting in injury, but they were acquitted last year of the most serious ones, including civil rights violations resulting in death. They have not been sentenced on those charges yet but are likely to face prison time.
In the federal trial, Demetrius Haley was convicted of excessive force resulting in injury, deliberate indifference resulting in injury, conspiracy to witness tamper and witness tampering. Smith and Tadarrius Bean were found guilty of witness tampering.
Two other officers involved in the killing, Emmitt Martin III and Desmond Mills Jr., pleaded guilty to state and federal charges.
During the week-long state trial, prosecutors and defense attorneys dissected videos of the beating gathered from a surveillance camera and the officers’ body cameras. The officers’ attorneys argued that the videos didn’t reflect the reality of what happened and the intense pressure the officers faced. If Nichols had cooperated when police attempted to handcuff him, the encounter would have ended differently, they told jurors.
The officers were following police policy and convicting them would handcuff the city, defense attorneys warned.
But Mills, one of the officers who already pleaded guilty, painted a different picture, telling the state jury that as he beat Nichols with a baton that night, Martin and Smith were yelling, “Hit him.”
Prosecutors said the trial wasn’t an indictment against all law enforcement, but about the actions of the three men on trial.
The jury found the former officers not guilty of second-degree murder, aggravated assault and kidnapping.
Policing is a demanding and challenging profession, said John Keith Perry, Bean’s lawyer. Bean built a reputation for “professionalism and integrity” and reducing his career to a single moment “does a disservice to the facts and to his record,” he said.
“The path forward must include accountability, but it must also include fairness,” Perry said. “That includes ensuring that Black officers are not disproportionately vilified or discarded when complex situations arise.”
Steve Mulroy, Shelby County’s district attorney, said he didn’t understand the jury’s verdict.
“I personally think any fair-minded person who watches the video would come to the conclusion that everybody there had some responsibility for Tyre Nichols’s death,” Mulroy said.
But his office, Mulroy said, will continue to hold officers responsible for their misdeeds despite the verdict.
“If we’re going to have any silver lining from this dark cloud of the event itself, it has to be that we need to reaffirm our commitments to police reform and to doing what we need to do to make sure that tragedies like this don’t happen again,” he said at a news conference after the verdict.
