Unarmed Black Man in Mississippi Was Killed by 20-Minute Police Chokehold, Lawyers Say
Attorneys for the family of Jonathan Sanders have told Mississippi state investigators that the unarmed black man died after being kept in a chokehold by a police officer for more than 20 minutes.
Items at a makeshift memorial in Stonewall, Miss., on Tuesday, near the spot where Jonathan Sanders is believed to have died at the hands of a white police officer. (Jeff Amy / AP)
Attorneys for the family of Jonathan Sanders have told Mississippi state investigators that the unarmed black man died after being kept in a chokehold by a police officer for more than 20 minutes and then being denied CPR. The lawyers also called the death racially motivated.
According to The Guardian:
State medical examiners provisionally found Jonathan Sanders died through homicide by manual asphyxiation, according to attorneys Chokwe Lumumba and CJ Lawrence.
Sanders, who was 39, repeatedly told Stonewall police officer Kevin Herrington “I can’t breathe”, according to one witness.
According to the attorneys, one witness alleged that Herrington said he was “going to get that nigger” seconds before confronting Sanders in Stonewall on the night of 8 July, and several said the officer was the aggressor. Police have described the encounter as “a fight”.
“We believe there is probable cause for a prosecution,” the attorney Lawrence said in an interview on Wednesday. “A determination should now be made by a jury at an open trial as to whether officer Herrington had any justification for choking Jonathan Sanders to death.”
The attorneys are requesting that a special prosecutor take over the case, citing remarks at a town hall meeting on Tuesday by Clarke County’s district attorney, Bilbo Mitchell, that he had handled 15 cases of killings by police during his career and none had resulted in an officer being indicted.
Read the full story here.
–Posted by Roisin Davis
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When I was visiting abroad recently, my non-American friends were quite candid with me: They see my country as increasingly intolerant, violent and inhospitable.
A Washington Post study reveals that approximately 40 percent of all unarmed men shot to death by police this year were black. Black males make up just 6 percent of the U.S. population.
The payment is larger than the total of more than 120 other lawsuits brought against the police department for alleged brutality and misconduct since 2011, according to The Baltimore Sun.
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