Even before the state trial began last month for the former police officers charged with fatally beating Tyre Nichols in Memphis, the defense notched an important victory.
The officers’ lawyers persuaded the judge to seat a jury from the area around Chattanooga, Tenn., hundreds of miles from where surveillance and body cameras captured the officers brutalizing Mr. Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, in January 2023. Given how the videos had horrified Memphis, the lawyers said, they questioned whether local jurors could consider the facts impartially when the former officers — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley and Justin Smith — went on trial.
Once the trial started, the defense lawyers took turns deflecting blame for the violence onto two other officers who were involved that night but were not on trial after pleading guilty. They also frequently reminded the jury of how dangerous policing can be, and of how their training allows for certain types of force at times.
“These cops serve in the most dangerous unit in the most dangerous city in the United States,” said Martin Zummach, a lawyer for Mr. Smith, noting the high crime rate in Memphis. He later described the officers as “doing a job that none of us in here have the guts to do, to keep us safe.”
All of those tactics are part of the playbook for defending police officers charged with excessive force and, some experts said, likely factored into the unanimous acquittal on all charges for all three defendants on Wednesday.
“The reason they’re fairly standard, the reason that we have that playbook, is because it works,” said Seth Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, though he added that the verdict “surprised the hell out of me” because of the violence captured on video.
Mr. Stoughton also noted that “there’s a huge difference between society saying, ‘We endorse the officers’ actions in this case,’ and society saying, ‘We don’t have sufficient proof of guilt here.’”
The killing of Mr. Nichols is one the highest profile cases that prosecutors have brought against police officers in the five years since the murder of George Floyd. All of the charged officers are Black.
All three officers were found guilty of witness tampering in a separate federal trial last fall, and Mr. Haley was found guilty on a lesser charge of violating Mr. Nichols’s civil rights by causing bodily injury. They were all acquitted, however, on the most serious civil rights charge of violating his civil rights by causing his death.
But the acquittal on Wednesday on an array of state charges, including second-degree murder, adds to a mixed record of convictions, acquittals and at least one mistrial for police officers and emergency workers since Mr. Floyd’s death.
For many in Memphis, a city of more than 600,000 where more than a third of Tennessee’s Black residents live, the acquittal was a wrenching outcome that contradicted what they saw on video.
“Those people were allowed to come here, look at the evidence and deny the evidence,” said RowVaughn Wells, Ms. Nichols’s mother, flanked by an emotional crowd gathered Thursday outside the Memphis museum that stands where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. She added, “they failed my son.”
Some policing experts said it demonstrated how likely a jury is to give leeway to law enforcement figures and the split-second calculations they must sometimes make in a job with high risks. To prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt, prosecutors had to show not only that the violence occurred, but that it was unlawful, Mr. Stoughton said.
Jurors also had to grapple with the familiar question of how much lethal force is justifiable when framed as a matter of an officer’s safety. Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said that while it is not unconstitutional for police officers to assume someone is going to hurt them, it can lead to behaviors and justification of certain actions that are.
The defense lawyers framed Mr. Nichols as a strong person who could hold his own against the officers, noting that he ran from them at one point after he was stopped for speeding. They also pointed to stolen cards and small amounts of marijuana and psilocybin mushroom they said were found in his car after the beating.
Another factor that helped the defense was that the two other former officers involved in the beating, Desmond Mills Jr. and Emmitt Martin III, were not on trial. Both pleaded guilty in the federal case; Mr. Mills also pleaded guilty in the state case and testified as part of his deal with the state.
It is unclear how Mr. Martin’s state case will be handled; his lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment and state prosecutors said they would wait for federal sentencing to decide their next move.
Prosecutors acknowledged that the absence of Mr. Mills and Mr. Martin from the row of defendants offered an opportunity for defense lawyers to more easily absolve their clients of legal culpability. On the video footage of the incident, Mr. Martin yanked Mr. Nichols out of his car and then, after Mr. Nichols broke away and was caught by officers, repeatedly kicked and punched him in the head.
Mr. Mills, who appeared after Mr. Nichols was caught near his mother’s house, hit him multiple times with a baton.
“Because two of the most culpable of the five defendants pled over in federal court and were not present in the state court trial, I think there was a structural challenge going in,” Steven J. Mulroy, the district attorney for Shelby County, said in an interview Thursday. “I still think there was more than enough evidence to convict.”
He added, “I think we have a long way to go in understanding the nature of the duty to intervene.”
In Memphis, it also did not go unnoticed that the state jury was predominantly white.
“One of the new experiences I have had, sitting in that courtroom, is watching an all-white jury attempt to humanize three Black men in a murder trial who were defendants,” said Dr. Earle Fisher, the senior pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Memphis. “And they only did it because they were police officers.”
The response in Memphis was swift when Mr. Nichols died three days after the beating, from blunt force injuries to his head. The elite policing unit that the officers belonged to was disbanded less than a month after the beating. Last year, a Justice Department civil rights investigation found a pattern of inequitable treatment toward Black people by the police force.
Chief Cerelyn Davis of the Memphis Police Department said in a video statement on Wednesday that “we believe in improved policing, in training and in progress we are seeing daily.”
But the Republican-dominated Tennessee Legislature overturned some of the changes that the Memphis City Council approved in the aftermath.
President Trump late last month signed an executive order instructing his administration to provide legal aid to officers accused of wrongdoing. And already in his second term, there has been an exodus from the civil rights division of the Justice Department, which prosecuted the federal case against the officers.
The department ordered an immediate halt to all new civil rights investigations shortly after Mr. Trump took office, as well as a pause on negotiating so-called consent decrees, which serve as legally binding improvement plans for police departments.
Before Mr. Trump took office, Memphis city officials had declined to enter such an agreement with the government, saying it would be labor intensive and costly.
Some Memphis residents saw the verdict as evidence of a shift in the country’s attitudes toward policing and racial inequality.
“The justice system doesn’t seem to be working very well right now,” said DeMarcus Gatlin, 48, a disabled Army National Guard veteran.
“This has been going on a long time,” Mr. Gatlin said, adding, “sooner or later, by the numbers, this will happen again.”
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.
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