In the 2019 killing of a young, unarmed Black man, George Floyd, a Colorado jury returned a verdict of guilty for one police officer and not guilty for the other on Thursday afternoon. After Randy Roedema and Jason Rosenblatt’s three-week trial for the murder of Elijah McClain, the jury of seven men and five women debated for just over two days.
However, only Mr. Roedema, 41, was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and assault by the jury. Both cops faced murder and attempted murder charges with manslaughter in their joint trial. On January 5th, Mr. Roedema will be given his punishment.
During a scuffle in Aurora, Colorado, police and paramedics put Mr. McClain, 23, in a chokehold and injected him with a strong sedative. Sadly, he passed away in the hospital a few days later. There are currently three trials going on, one each for the three police officers and two paramedics who have been accused in his death. Mr. Roedema’s and Mr. Rosenblatt’s trial was the first of its kind.
Those who had been demanding answers for Mr. McClain’s death four years ago were taken aback by the decision’s divided verdict. “How do you find one guilty while finding the other innocent?” What kind of justice is this? Aurora activist Candice Bailey, who spearheaded many of the earliest marches calling for police reform, made this statement.
Sheneen McClain, Mr. McClain’s mother, was anxious during the trial that all five men be found guilty. None of them carried out their duties as expected that evening. She said before the verdict was read, “The police didn’t do their job that night and neither did the paramedics,” adding, “They worked as a team to murder my son.”
Upon the indictment of the officers in 2021, the Aurora Police Association stated, “Our officers did nothing wrong.” Ms. McClain had been there throughout the trial, bearing witness to horrible images of her son’s murder. After leaving the courthouse on Thursday with one fist up, Ms. McClain reportedly told reporters, “This is the divided states of America, and that’s what happens.”
Almost immediately, the case gained prominence as a gauge of police accountability in the post-George Floyd era among activists and watchers of the criminal justice system. It was one of the first cases involving a death in police custody and subsequent criminal charges since Mr. Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in the summer of 2020, which sparked nationwide demonstrations and calls for reform.
It was unusual that five first responders were prosecuted in Mr. McClain’s murder following a state inquiry, and not just because he was not accused of committing any crime. Aurora was profoundly split over the case, but the state of Colorado passed one of the most thorough police accountability laws in the country as a result. Chokeholds and ketamine are now both illegal in Colorado.
Attorney General Phil Weiser of Colorado stated on Thursday that the ruling was about “accountability.” Everyone is answerable to the law, and everyone is treated equally. On August 24, 2019, Mr. McClain, a massage therapist, was detained by police as he walked home from a convenience shop in Aurora after a 911 caller characterized him as “sketchy.“
His mother claimed he danced around with his arms in the air and wore a mask to keep warm since he was anemic. After a carotid chokehold and ketamine injection ended an 18-minute standoff, police officers placed him in a carotid hold. Prosecutors claim that while lying on the ground handcuffed, Mr. McClain vomited, begged for his life, and said, “I can’t breathe” seven times to the police.
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Some of this incident was caught on police body-camera film. Several days later, he went into cardiac arrest and died in the hospital. The state’s attorneys extensively relied on the audio and footage from the officers’ body cameras to make their case that their acts were excessively violent.
They said that Mr. McClain was too weak from the shackles to get any benefit from the injection given to him by the paramedics. Mr. Rosenblatt and Mr. Roedema’s attorneys both maintained that the police were performing their duties and placed the responsibility on higher-ranking cops, medical personnel, and Mr. McClain.
But Harvey Steinberg, Mr. Rosenblatt’s attorney, differentiated in his defense, saying that his client was not with Mr. McClain at the time of the ketamine injection. Mr. Roedema’s suspension from the force has been finalized. Mr. Rosenblatt was let off from the Aurora Police Department in 2020 after he saw images of other officers reenacting the chokehold used on Mr. McClain.
The tweet below verifies the news:
Breaking News: One Colorado officer was convicted and another was acquitted in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old unarmed Black man. https://t.co/1dbBnVuiQv
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 12, 2023
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The text had elicited a “Haha” from him. The prosecution presented the testimony of Dr. David Beuther, a nationally renowned pulmonologist, who claimed that the officers’ conduct led to acidosis, hypoxia, and aspiration, all of which contributed to Mr. McClain’s death.
According to Dr. Beuther, he would have needed to be hospitalized in the intensive care unit before the ketamine, and it was uncertain how much he would have recovered. No witnesses testified for the defense, and neither did the accused. The defense argued that Mr. McClain’s resistance justified the officers’ use of force, saying that he had been warned to stop 34 times and had grabbed for Mr. Rosenblatt’s pistol.
Since his client had only been a police officer for two years, he was the least experienced person there, thus Mr. Steinberg referred to him as a “sacrificial lamb.” An acquittal, he said, “has to be the final chapter of this ugly, ugly story.”
Aurora’s district attorney decided not to seek charges against the police officers involved in the death of Elijah McClain two months after the incident because the coroner was unable to determine the manner of McClain’s death. Until Mr. Floyd’s tragic death in 2020, when his interaction with a Minneapolis police officer was captured on camera and went viral, the matter seemed to be closed.
The governor of Colorado appointed a special prosecutor to look into Mr. Floyd’s death within a matter of weeks. In the end, Mr. McClain’s death was attributed to complications from the injection of ketamine after he had been restrained violently, and a statewide grand jury indicted the five emergency responders on 32 counts.
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