Justice Department will not file federal criminal charges in Tamir Rice killing News
Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr
Justice Department will not file federal criminal charges in Tamir Rice killing

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Tuesday that it would not file federal criminal charges against two Cleveland police officers involved in the 2014 shooting of 12 year old Tamir Rice.

The lengthy statement began with an overview of the relevant law, which requires the government to “prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the use of force was objectively unreasonable based on all of the surrounding circumstances,” as well as to show “that the officers acted willfully.” The statement then went through the facts of the incident, noting that the individual who called 911 that day mentioned to the operator that the suspect was “probably a juvenile” and that he thought the gun was fake, but that information was not relayed to officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, who as a result thought they were responding to an incident where a grown man was brandishing an actual gun at a public playground.

The department’s announcement also made much of the fact that video evidence from the scene was lacking audio, was grainy and shot from a distance, and was a time-lapse video capturing only two frames per second. The statement noted that the DOJ’s video expert concluded that “[t]he video and the corresponding still frames are incapable of capturing the nuances of continuous action.” After a review of all the facts, the department found “that the evidence is insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Loehmann willfully violated Tamir Rice’s constitutional rights, or that Officers Loehmann or Garmback obstructed justice.”

In 2015 an Ohio grand jury had also declined to indict the two officers, though the city of Cleveland did pay a $6 million settlement to Tamir Rice’s family in 2016. In a statement to the media, Subodh Chandra, the family’s lawyer, said that they “ha[d] been cheated of a fair process yet again.” US Representative Marcia Fudge of Ohio tweeted that she was “extremely disappointed” with the decision by DOJ not to file federal charges, and said that “justice still has not been served.”

The DOJ announcement comes just over a week after the Tamir Rice Foundation announced the groundbreaking for construction of the Tamir Rice Afrocentric Cultural Center. The Center is planned to be located in downtown Cleveland and will serve youths in the community aged 10-19.

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