Baton Rouge police officers won’t be charged in fatal shooting of Alton Sterling

Authorities in Louisiana said Tuesday that the Baton Rouge police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling will not face criminal charges, a decision announced nearly two years after his death prompted intense protests.

The announcement makes Sterling’s death the latest high-profile police shooting to end without charges for officers involved, following on the heels of federal authorities last year declining to prosecute either officer in the case. Sterling was killed in July 2016 by officers responding to a call about a man who had threatened someone with a gun. The Baton Rouge officers then encountered Sterling, 37, selling CDs outside of a convenience store, and fatally shot him during an encounter that lasted less than 90 seconds.

“This decision was not taken lightly,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said during a news briefing Tuesday morning. He added: “I know the Sterling family is hurting. I know that they may not agree with this decision.”

The Justice Department said last year it decided against bringing federal charges against officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake, concluding that there was “insufficient” evidence to prove that they violated Sterling’s civil rights. Federal law sets a very high bar for civil rights charges against officers, requiring that authorities prove an officer’s intent at the time of the shooting.

Landry said the state could not proceed with a prosecution of either officer involved based on an extensive review of evidence gathered by federal authorities as well as his office’s own investigation.

During a 20-minute announcement detailing this decision, Landry said the investigation concluded that both officers “attempted to make a lawful arrest of Alton Sterling based upon probable cause.” He said the officers acted on the assumption that Sterling was armed while resisting the officers’ attempts to arrest him. After Sterling was shot, Lake found and removed a loaded .38 caliber handgun from Sterling’s right front pocket, according to Landry’s office.

Landry also said toxicology reports showed that Sterling had drugs in his system at the time of his death, which Landry linked to Sterling’s behavior during his encounter with police.

“It is reasonable that Mr. Sterling was under the influence and that contributed to his noncompliance,” said Landry, who did not take questions after announcing his decision.

Landry’s office also released a 34-page report which said Sterling’s body tested positive for opioids, cocaine and other drugs, results that “clearly indicated that he was under the influence of a combination of illegal substances,” this report stated.

The same report also said Sterling’s autopsy showed he had been shot six times – three times in the chest and three more times in his back – and all six bullets were recovered from his body. His cause of death was deemed a homicide caused by gunshot wounds to his heart, lung, esophagus and liver.

Sterling’s death in July 2016 came at a fraught moment of racial tension nationwide amid shootings by and of police officers. A day after Sterling’s death prompted outrage and protests, an officer in Minnesota shot and killed Philando Castile, a school cafeteria worker, during a traffic stop, the aftermath of which was streamed live on Facebook. That same week, five police officers in Dallas were gunned down by a black man angry at police, and just days later, another gunman killed three officers in Baton Rouge.

After the Justice Department said in May 2017 it would not pursue charges, Landry said he would launch a state probe into the shooting. His office took over a state investigation into whether the officers would face criminal charges after Hillar C. Moore III, the prosecutor for East Baton Rouge, recused himself from the investigation because he had a prior relationship with Salamoni’s parents, both of whom worked with the Baton Rouge police.

In explaining why it took so long for the state to announce its decision, Landry said Tuesday that his office was “effectively sidelined” during the federal probe because it was closed off to Louisiana officials.

Sterling’s relatives and their attorneys assailed the decision, noting that they would continue pressing the case through a civil lawsuit filed last year.

“The system failed us,” Sandra Sterling, his aunt, said during a news conference. “He was not a monster… . This was a family man. A family man.”

An attorney for Lake could not be reached for comment. John McLindon, the Baton Rouge attorney representing Salamoni, said he was not surprised by the decision not to charge his client.

“Every use of force expert that has looked at this … has concluded that it was a justified shooting,” McLindon said. “I’m not surprised at all by this announcement.”

McLindon said that he expects the police department will now fire both officers by arguing that even if the shooting did not amount to something criminal, it was a violation of departmental policies. He also said the officers are already planning to appeal that firing.

McLindon added that he found the attorney general’s comments about the toxicology report illuminating, and said that it perhaps helps explain why Sterling did not comply.

“I always suspected that Mr. Sterling was high on drugs,” he said.

Murphy Paul, the Baton Rouge police chief, said his department will continue its administrative review of how both officers acted in order to determine whether any policies or procedures were violated. He said the department hopes to conclude that process by Friday.

“We’re asking our community for just a little more patience,” Paul, who was sworn in as police chief in January, said at a news conference after Landry spoke.

Officers are rarely charged for on-duty shootings, and convictions in such cases are even more rare. Last week, a Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed Australian woman in 2017 was charged with murder and manslaughter. Those charges came about nine months after a jury in Minnesota acquitted the officer who shot and killed Philando Castile during the traffic stop a day after Sterling was killed.

Since 2005, 85 non-federal law enforcement officers – a group that includes police officers, state troopers and deputy sheriffs – have been arrested for murder or manslaughter after fatally shooting someone while on-duty, according to Philip Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, who studies arrests of officers and has kept data since that year.

Of those officers, 41 have not been convicted, most of them acquitted by juries or during a bench trial, he said. Another 32 officers were convicted of a crime, half through guilty pleas and the other half by juries, though several were convicted of lesser charges, Stinson said. The Minneapolis officer charged last week is one of a dozen with his case still pending.

The Justice Department’s decision not to pursue charges in the Sterling case marked the first time under Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the department declined to prosecute a police officer investigated for wrongdoing in a high-profile case. That decision caused frustration in Baton Rouge not only for the lack of charges, but also because the news was reported by The Washington Post before federal officials had informed Sterling’s family.

But while declining to pursue charges in Sterling’s death, federal authorities provided Sterling’s family with new details about his death. After meeting with investigators, Chris Stewart, the lead attorney for the Sterling family, told reporters that evidence shows that at the beginning of the interaction with Sterling, Officer Salamoni put his gun to Sterling’s head, and said, “I’ll kill you, b—.”

Video of the following 90 seconds shows officers telling Sterling to put his hands on the hood of a car. When he did not, a struggle ensued with Salamoni pulling out his gun and pointing it at Sterling’s head and later Lake attempting to shoot Sterling with a Taser.

Salamoni tackled Sterling and, with Sterling on his back with both officers on top of him, one of the officers appears to yell “He’s got a gun!” Then shots rang out.

While fatal shootings by police have continued at about the same pace as previous years, according to the Washington Post’s database tracking these incidents, these incidents have drawn less national attention recently and largely faded from the national political debate.

Some fatal shootings still prompt widespread media attention, including the death earlier this month of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man shot and killed by Sacramento police officers while in his grandmother’s backyard. The death of Clark, who was holding an iPhone at the time that police said they mistook for a gun, has given way to extended protests in that city.

California’s attorney general said Tuesday that at the Sacramento police chief’s request, his office would “provide independent oversight” of the probe into Clark’s death.