Crime and Justice

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Source: The Washington Post / Getty
Not that we needed confirmation that Tyre Nichols, the victim of arguably one of the most vicious police brutality attacks ever recorded, wasn’t a threat to the five Memphis police officers who allegedly beat him to death during a January 2023 stop, but one of the officers testified Monday that Nochols’ killing didn’t need to happen because, in fact, he “wasn’t a threat.”

According to the Associated Press, ex-officer Emmitt Martin III — who pleaded guilty last month to using excessive force and failing to intervene in the unlawful assault, as well as conspiracy to cover up his use of unlawful force — took the stand in the federal trial of his former co-workers, Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley and Justin Smith, all of whom have pleaded not guilty to charges accusing them of depriving Nichols of his civil rights through excessive force and failure to intervene, and obstructed justice through witness tampering. The fifth former officer, Desmond Mills Jr., also took a plea deal in exchange for testimony against Bean, Haley and Smith.
From AP:
For the first time in the trial, jurors heard from one of the officers who beat Nichols. Martin said he and his former colleagues — members of the Scorpion Unit, a Memphis police team that looked for drugs, illegal guns and violent criminals — would justify the force they used against a person by exaggerating the person’s actions against them. The unit was disbanded shortly after Nichols’ death.
Martin said he saw Nichols speed up to beat a red light and then change lanes without signaling, leading Martin to follow Nichols with his police car lights on. Haley eventually stopped Nichols’ Nissan, pulled out his gun and snatched Nichols from his vehicle without telling Nichols why he was stopped.
Martin also had his gun out, and joined Haley in trying to restrain Nichols while yelling various conflicting commands, such as telling Nichols to give the officers his hands, turn on his stomach and put his hands behind his back.
Meanwhile, Nichols was passively resisting the officers in a non-aggressive manner — by pulling his hands away from the officers, who were trying to handcuff him without telling him why, Martin said.
Cops always seem to be surprised and offended when a citizen, especially a Black citizen, wants to know why they’re being arrested before they just surrender willingly. It’s almost as if a police officer’s ego just can’t take their authority being challenged even when the challenge is reasonable. Nichols wanted to know why he was being taken in during a routine traffic stop, and he was killed for it.
“He wasn’t a threat,” Martin testified. “He was helpless.”
According to the New York Times, Martin also admitted that he punched and kicked the 29-year-old during the altercation, and he lied about it, confident that his fellow officers would back him up.

“I knew they weren’t going to tell on me,” Martin said. “And I wasn’t going to tell on them.”
A lot of “back the blue” advocates might be surprised to learn how often the “blue wall of silence” is all that separates police officers from common criminals. Of course, the streets has its own no-snitch policy, but no one on those streets committing violent crimes has the backing of a police union and a “justice” system that they can almost always count on to give them the benefit of the doubt.
“These are criminal defendants, they just happen to be police officers,” Kami N. Chavis, a law professor at the College of William & Mary and director of the school’s criminal justice program, told the Times. “The fact that they are testifying against their fellow officers says nothing about the code of silence. It says the code of silence is so strong it took a criminal proceeding in order for these officers to finally tell the truth.”
Martin acknowledged to prosecutors that he was testifying in hopes of receiving a more lenient prison sentence, but he also claimed he was turning on his fellow officers “just get this off of me.”
“I can’t sit here and live with a lie — the truth needs to come out,” he said. “It was eating me up inside to live with a lie.”
But if this case had just been a drop in a sea of police brutality cases that get swept under the rug regularly, would he still have been so guilt-ridden? Would he have offered up this mea culpa if he wasn’t facing any prison time at all?
All five ex-officers have been charged with second-degree murder in state court, and all of them pleaded not guilty, including Martin. AP noted that Martin and Mills are expected to change their pleas. A court date for their state trial has not yet been scheduled.