Jurors find video isn’t providing 20/20 vision

The New York Times

The body-cam video suddenly turns shaky as an Ohio police officer fires his gun into a car, leaving an unarmed black motorist dead, shot in the head. In Wisconsin, slow-motion images show an armed man lobbing his gun over a fence, then falling backward, before a police officer fires a fatal shot into his chest. And in Minnesota, a police dashboard camera captures an officer abruptly firing seven shots at the driver of a car he has stopped, as the man’s girlfriend and her young daughter watch from inside the car.

Each of these videos held an essential role in a courtroom this month, as jurors tried to decide whether the officers had committed crimes — yet, none of the cases brought convictions.

Since the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. there has been a nationwide push for more video recording of the police. But, as the three cases this month show, videos by no means ensure convictions.

“It’s not the end-all, beall,” said John T. Chisholm, the district attorney for Milwaukee County, who presented video from two officers’ body cameras in the case against Dominique Heaggan-Brown, a police officer who fatally shot Sylville K. Smith in August. On Wednesday, Mr. Heaggan-Brown was acquitted.

Without body-camera video from the shooting of Smith, Mr. Chisholm said in an interview, he would not have brought criminal charges against the officer who fired the fatal shot.

But jurors, watching these images playing on projection screens in courtrooms, have not come away with simple answers. In some trials, a single piece of body-camera footage has been used to illustrate competing viewpoints: In the Milwaukee case, slowed-down, frameby-frame video was used to show that the suspect had no weapon when he was shot a second time. The same video, played at regular speed, revealed a scene that was swift, confusing and chaotic, a boost to the defense.

Some jurors in these cases have said that, videos aside, they had been swayed most of all by officers’ assertions that they feared for their lives.

Bonita Schultz, a juror in the case against Officer Jeronimo Yanez in Minnesota this month, said the jury had struggled with what it could not see from the dashboard camera video. Defense lawyers suggested that Philando Castile, who was fatally shot by Officer Yanez, was reaching for a gun in the moments before he was shot, though Castile’s girlfriend, in the passenger seat, said he was not.

The dashboard camera video did not provide a close-up view of the front seat, but in the end, Ms. Schultz said, she was convinced by the officer’s account.

“It looked like he was trying to control the situation but couldn’t,” she said of Officer Yanez in the dashboard camera footage, which she described as “90 percent of the evidence” in the case. “It didn’t show everything, but it showed enough.”