New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
No verdict in state trooper manslaughter trial
MILFORD — Jurors deliberated for a second day on Thursday in the manslaughter trial of Connecticut State Police Trooper Brian North in the fatal shooting of Mubarak Soulemane.
The jury did not reach a verdict Thursday and was dismissed for the day. They will reconvene to continue deliberations starting at 9 a.m. Friday.
North, who rejected a plea offer in the case calling for a sentence of up to 10 years in prison with a right to argue for less time behind bars, faces up to 40 years if convicted of firstdegree manslaughter with a firearm.
But per the judge’s instructions, the jury can exonerate North of that charge and still convict him of either of two lesser included charges: seconddegree manslaughter with a firearm, a Class C felony punishable by up to 10 years, or criminally negligent homicide, a Class A misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of a year behind bars.
Following final instructions from the judge Wednesday, the four men and two women began deliberations that afternoon on the trial’s eighth day, which began with brief testimony from a rebuttal witness from the prosecution.
The jury deliberated for about a half-hour before sending a note to the judge asking for more information about a possible defense in the case — that North said he was protecting other officers — then deliberated about 20 minutes more before asking for more instructions. The judge excused them for the day about 4:25 p.m. after saying he’d give them a print-out of his final instructions Thursday morning.
On Thursday, the jury sent another note around 3 p.m. asking for technical assistance. The note said the sound stopped working on the laptop they were given to view evidence.
A marshal retrieved the laptop and brought it into the courtroom, where the lawyers rebooted the device and solved the issue and the jury resumed deliberations.
Before the jury began deliberating on Wednesday, attorneys made closing arguments, illustrating the competing interpretations of North’s decision to fire seven shots through the driver’s side window of a stolen sedan driven by Soulemane after a chase on Interstate 95 and a crash in West Haven Jan. 15, 2020.
On Wednesday morning, a rebuttal expert hired by the state said officers at the scene should have called a “tactical pause” to allow for a supervisor to provide more guidance.
North’s lawyer, Frank Riccio, said his client had no choice because he had an “objectively reasonable” belief that Robert Rappa, a West Haven police officer who broke the passenger’s side window of the car, could be in mortal danger from a knife Soulemane was holding.
“Sadly, what other forces could have been used?” he said, arguing his client was “doing his job” after a reported carjacking with a knife followed by a high-speed pursuit down a busy highway, with a suspect that had not shown “one iota of compliance” up to that point.
The prosecutor, Inspector General Robert Devlin, noted that North didn’t say he thought Rappa or Trooper Joshua Jackson, who was also on the other side of the vehicle, were in danger until he provided a statement a month after the shooting, having reviewed video of the incident with his lawyer and union representative.
The night of the shooting, he noted, North told fellow cops he started shooting after Soulemane came to when the window was broken and pulled a knife from his pants.
“He saw the knife and he fired,” Devlin repeated again and again during his closing argument.
“In this case, we’ve had too many excuses, too many rationalizations,” he said. “This young man is dead and he shouldn’t be, that’s the bottom line.”
After prosecutors presented their case to open the trial last week, North took the stand Friday in his own defense and said he thought two other officers could be in lethal danger when he shot Soulemane seven times on Campbell Avenue in West Haven following the highway chase.
“I had tunnel vision at that point,” he said, describing his emotions as “almost like an, ‘Oh, my God,’ feeling.”
On Friday, North said Soulemane initially appeared unresponsive after crashing into an SUV on Jan. 15, 2020, on a highway underpass following the chase, but “came to,” began reaching into his pants and took out a knife after West Haven Police Officer Robert Rappa used a baton to break the passenger-side window.
“I felt like I had to act in that moment or the West Haven officer or possibly Trooper Jackson could be killed,” he said.
During cross-examination by Devlin, North affirmed that neither officer was actually inside the vehicle; that it would have been unreasonable to shoot Soulemane if he had known that at the time; and that if Rappa had been going into the vehicle, North’s bullets could have ricocheted and hit the officer.
Devlin also got North, who said throughout his testimony that he relied on his training, to admit that training consisted of recommendations contrary to some of the officers’ actions during the 2020 incident, like a PowerPoint slide that said, for felony traffic stops, “Do not approach the car!” The trooper, echoing others who were at the scene and have taken the stand, testified that they had to respond to a “dynamic, evolving event.”