No Criminal Charges For Police Officers Who Murdered Stephon Clark

Stephon Clark was killed, no, murdered last March after Sacramento police responded to a 911 call of a man breaking car windows in a South Sacramento neighborhood. When officers arrived on the scene, they searched outside a nearby residence and, after seeing Stephon Clark, they pursued him into a backyard—which they later learned was his grandmother's home—where they shot him.

After the shooting, Sacramento police officers Jared Robinet and Terrence Mercadal said they thought Clark had a gun, but they only found a cellphone at the scene. One of the officers saw a "flash of light that he believed was the muzzle" of a gun in the seconds before the shooting, and that "Clark had in fact advanced at the officers" before they fired.

Two officers murdered a man with a cell phone.

Now, later on, DNA evidence confirmed that Clark was the individual who broke the windows and a sliding glass door with a cinder block, but should he have been killed for that?

Stephon Clark's murder sparked demonstrations and immediate calls for the district attorney to bring criminal charges against Robinet and Mercadal, and after the police department released body-camera videos from the shooting, demonstrators spilled into the streets of downtown Sacramento, at one point bringing traffic on a major freeway to a stop and, later, blocking thousands of fans from entering a Sacramento Kings game.

Stephon Clark’s mother, SeQuette Clark, said it best:

"I don't care if he was a criminal. None of that matters. What matters is how those officers came with lethal force around a corner, on a vandalism call, after my son and gunned him down — when he had nothing but a cellphone in his hand."

He broke some windows, which makes him not a nice man, which makes him a criminal, a vandal, but does that warrant being shot to death?

Apparently so, because last week, nearly a year after the murder, Sacramento District Attorney Anne-Marie Schubert announced that the two officers will not face criminal charges. And Schubert is appearing to make the shooting justified for several reasons …

Schubert says, after her office investigated the shooting, they discovered that Stephon Clark may have been contemplating suicide in the days leading up to the shooting.

So, he broke a few windows so officers would chase him down the street and shoot him to death? Or maybe it’s this …

Schubert says that, two days before his death Salena Manni, the mother of Clark's children, called the police on Clark to report physical abuse.

So, he broke a few windows a few days later and the officers chased him down the street and shot him to death because he’d allegedly assaulted his girlfriend two days earlier, something the officers knew nothing about?

Anne-Marie Schubert is blaming Stephon Clark for his own murder.

Schubert described text messages, Internet searches and drafts of emails seized from Clark's cellphone, which she said showed he feared he would be arrested. Investigators also discovered communications on Clark's cellphone indicating that he sent Manni text messages implying that he wanted to kill himself.

Again, so Stephon Clark was distraught, and perhaps suicidal, but how does that matter at all in his being chased down the street for breaking some windows and then being shot to death?

Robinet and Mercadal, while chasing Stephon Clark down the street had no knowledge that he was either suicidal, or that he’d assaulted his girlfriend two days earlier; they didn’t even know his name.

Former Sacramento police chief Rick Braziel believes Anne-Marie Schubert is making the case that Stephon Clark committed "suicide by cop," but when taking questions from reporters, Schubert said she was not suggesting Clark wanted to commit suicide-by-cop.

And yet she brought it up, in a news conference where she announced that two police officers pursued a black man into a backyard, assumed he had a gun, and fired twenty … twenty … shots at him, hitting him seven times, even though he was holding a cell phone.

And please, do not make the argument that police officers have to err on the side of caution; I know that. But twenty shots.

Twenty shots at a man who broke a few windows and never fired one shot at police because he didn’t have a gun.

NPR