No prison time for NY cop in death of unarmed man
Print Edition
A FORMER US police officer who shot an unarmed man to death in a darkened stairwell has been spared prison time, and a judge reduced his manslaughter conviction to a lesser charge in a case that became a flashpoint for police accountability.
Peter Liang was sentenced on Tuesday to five years’ probation and 800 hours of community service in the 2014 shooting of Akai Gurley, who was walking down a public housing stairway when Liang, a rookie officer, fired a bullet into the dark — by accident after being startled, he said. The bullet ricocheted and killed Gurley, 28.
Speaking softly, Liang told the court he never meant to fire and apologized to Gurley’s family.
“My life is forever changed,” he added. “I hope you give me a chance to rebuild it.”
Liang, 28, is the first New York City police officer convicted in an on-duty shooting in 11 years. A jury found him guilty this winter of a manslaughter charge carrying up to 15 years in prison. But Brooklyn state Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun reduced the offense on Tuesday to criminally negligent homicide, which carries up to four years in prison.
He said prosecutors hadn’t met the legal burden for the manslaughter charge: proving that Liang consciously disregarded a substantial, unjustifiable risk of death.
And, the judge said, “given the defendant’s background and how remorseful he is, it would not be necessary to incarcerate the defendant to have a just sentence in this case.”
Reduce the conviction
Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson had recommended against prison for Liang, but the prosecutor said on Tuesday he would appeal the judge’s decision to reduce the conviction. Defense lawyer Paul Shechtman said Liang would also appeal his remaining conviction, though the day’s developments marked “a very good chapter” for him.
The shooting happened in a year of debate across the United States about police killings of unarmed black men, and activists have looked to Liang’s prosecution as a counterweight to cases in which grand juries have declined to indict officers, including those who killed Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York. Like Brown and Garner, Gurley was black. Liang is Chinese-American.
Liang’s supporters say he has been made a scapegoat for past injustices. More than 10,000 of his backers rallied in New York and across the US after the verdict, protesting his conviction.
Dozens of demonstrators representing both sides gathered on Tuesday on opposite sides of the street outside the courthouse, separated by police barricades. “Nobody really won here,” Liang supporter Karlin Chan said. “We still feel this was a politically motivated prosecution.”
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