No charges for 2 Buffalo officers seen on video punching man
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Two Buffalo police officers seen on video punching a man in the face while he was on the ground won’t face criminal charges stemming from the encounter last year, a prosecutor has decided.
The Monroe County District Attorney’s office confirmed Friday that its investigation into the case of Quentin Suttles is ending without charges against Officers Ronald Ammerman and Michael Scheu, media reports said.
“We reviewed the orders of when they could use force, and we came to the conclusion that no charges were warranted against the police officers,” District Attorney Sandra Doorley told The Buffalo News.
She said her office, which was appointed as a special prosecutor for the inquiry, had spoken with Suttles and the officers and had looked at the officers’ body camera video and cellphone video from Suttles’ girlfriend.
Suttles’ lawyer, Prathima Reddy, decried the decision as “nothing short of a miscarriage of justice.”
The videos show the officers forcibly arresting Suttles, who is Black, after pulling him over and asking him about marijuana last May 10. An initially calm interaction changes as police search Suttles, 30. He denies having the drug and police tell him to take his hands out of his pockets.
He is soon on the ground, saying “I don’t have nothing!” Some of the body camera video is then obscured by what appears to be clothing, but the cellphone video shows Suttles being punched in the face as officers hold him down and a woman off-camera screams “Get off of him!” Eventually, officers appear to secure his hands behind his back.
His lawyer has said Suttles’ shoulder and eye socket were fractured, and he has filed a notice of claim, a step toward a lawsuit.
“These officers forcefully assaulted and violated Mr. Suttles without reason or justification and now with no criminal consequences,” Reddy said.
Ammerman’s attorney, Rodney O. Personius, told the Buffalo News the videos “conclusively demonstrated the suspect was combative and intent on inventing a false narrative.” Scheu’s layer, Terrence M. Connors, called Scheu “a terrific policeman” and said prosecutors “came to the correct conclusion.”
President Joe Biden has two seats to fill on the influential appeals court in the nation’s capital that regularly feeds judges to the Supreme Court.
They are among the roughly 10 percent of federal judgeships that are or will soon be open, giving Biden his first chance to make his mark on the American judiciary.
Barring an improbable expansion of the Supreme Court, Biden won’t be able to do anything about the high court’s entrenched conservative majority any time soon. Justice Clarence Thomas, at 72, is the oldest of the court’s conservatives and the three appointees of former President Donald Trump, ranging in age from 49 to 56, are expected to be on the bench for decades.
Democrats traditionally have not made the judiciary a focus, but that is changing after four years of Trump and the vast changes he made. Biden’s appointments are also the only concrete moves he has right now to affect the judiciary at large, though there is talk about expanding the number of judges on lower courts.
The nearly 90 seats that Biden can fill, which give their occupants life tenure after Senate confirmation, are fewer than former Trump inherited four years ago.