A federal judge in Tennessee ordered the new judgments on Thursday for three former Memphis Police officers who were convicted of serious crimes in the beating of Tire Nichols after a 2023 traffic stop.
A federal jury condemned Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley and Justin Smith last year for charges related to the death of Nichols, 29, who died after he was beaten and skated by officers, assaults that were captured in surveillance video.
The three men were acquitted in May for state positions.
In a ruling on Thursday, the main district judge of the United States, Sheryl Lipman, found no partial decision of the federal judge in the case of 2024, as the lawyers of the officers argued.
But she said that new trials were justified due to a comment that was alleged that the judge did after the trial that the Memphis Police Department was “infiltrated at top with gang members.”
It was alleged that the United States District Judge, Mark Norris, made the comment after his legal employee was shot in the chest during a car theft on October 8, five days after the federal jury condemned by Bean, Haley and Smith, according to judicial documents.
An assistant prosecutor from the United States said she recalled that Norris said that “he could not meet with any member of the Memphis Police Department to give a statement about the shooting of his employee, since MPD is” infiltrated at the top of gang members, “according to the background of the case cited by Lipman.
Norris, who had to sentence Bean, Haley and Smith in December, withdrew from the case on June 13. The three have not been sentenced.
Lipman cited other decisions that said that the constitution process clause may sometimes require a challenge even when a judge has no bias.
“What is required is’ not only an absence of real bias, but an absence of even the appearance of judicial bias,” Lipman wrote, citing a past case.
Lipman wrote that “the risk of bias is too high to be constitutionally tolerable” and that, therefore, the three officers deserved new judgments.
Martin Zummach, who represents Smith, said Thursday: “I think Judge Lipman did the right thing.”
Zummach said that defense lawyers learned of the comments attributed to Norris three days before the sentence had been scheduled. “I immediately said: ‘We have to get a new test. That’s the only right one,” he said.
Bean and Haley’s lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comments by email.
Nichols was beaten by police officers after they stopped him during a traffic stop on January 7, 2023 and fled on foot, and the officers hit him after they reached him, the video that captured the incident showed. He died three days later.
The video, released about three weeks later, seemed to show the aggressive, chaotic and sometimes inconsistent demands of Police Nichols, as he provided his hands while his arm was being held and they were doing it standing. They also seem to show the police hit him while he was detained.
Haley was convicted of two charges of deprivation of rights that result in bodily injuries and two manipulation charges with a witness, victim or informant.
Smith and Bean were convicted of a manipulation charge with a witness, victim or informant, and were acquitted by the other three charges against them.
Zummach, Smith’s lawyer, said that because Smith and Bean were acquitted of the most serious civil rights counts, they cannot be accused of those positions again in a new trial.
In total, five police officers are now federally accused. Former Police Emmitt Martin and Desmond Mills declared themselves guilty. They have not been sentenced.
