UPDATE: May 12, 2015, 4:38 PM EDT
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A white Wisconsin police officer won’t face criminal charges for fatally shooting an unarmed 19-year-old biracial man who witnesses say was acting erratically and had assaulted two people, a prosecutor announced Tuesday.
Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, who is biracial but identifies as black, said he won’t file charges against Madison Officer Matt Kenny in the death of Tony Robinson. Kenny shot Robinson on March 6 in an apartment house near the state Capitol building.
Police said Kenny was responding to calls that Robinson was running in and out of traffic and had assaulted two people. They said Robinson attacked the officer after he entered the apartment house.
Ozanne said Kenny used lawful deadly force in the encounter with Robinson.
Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne
The city’s black community mounted daily rallies for a week after the shooting. The protests were peaceful, although demonstrators demanded Kenny be fired and charged with homicide.
The state Department of Justice investigated the shooting under a state law that requires outside agencies to lead probes into officer-involved deaths. The state agency handed over its findings to Ozanne on March 27.
The shooting was another in a series of police confrontations that have ignited racial tension across the nation in the past year, and the second such officer-involved death in Wisconsin during the period. Milwaukee Police Officer Christopher Manney, who is white, fatally shot 31-year-old Dontre Hamilton, who was black, during a scuffle in a downtown park in April 2014.
Manney also wasn’t charged. The local district attorney, who is white, said Manney acted in self-defense, which sparked days of peaceful protests in the state’s largest city. But Manney was fired for what Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn said was improperly frisking Hamilton in the lead-up to the shooting. A police commission upheld the dismissal.
Most recently in Baltimore, riots erupted after the funeral for Freddie Gray, a black man who suffered a fatal spinal injury while in police custody. Other high-profile cases of officers killing unarmed black residents include the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York City; and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina.
Six officers involved in Gray’s death have been charged, as has the officer who killed Scott. Grand juries declined to charge the officers involved in Brown’s and Garner’s deaths.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Anyone with half a brain listening to the first few minutes of the DAs conference knew this was going to happen Mr Robinson being “over” 6ft tall,which was strange to say the least,and that was only the beginning,also bringing Marti Luther King,and the DA sweating profusely from the outset.
It’s gotta be hard to do your job without sweating when a large number of people have already done your job for you in deciding guilt based on seeing essentially none of the evidence and assumptions based entirely on emotions. This new “justice-system” based on riots, disruptive protests and media-fueled outrage is nonsense and hurts the credibility of the real justice system in cases where there is actually unlawful use of deadly force (of which we have admittedly seen far too much recently).
Right. Let’s go back to the good old days when weenies and would be Grand Dragons–without sheets–could kill at will. That was justice.
Good cops better stand up soon or become part of the blue social disease.
Or better yet, young black men hopped up on drugs shouldn’t attack armed police officers, which is what happened in this case.
Like Eric Garner, for example.