Verdicts

It started off as a routine traffic stop on a high school student in a residential neighborhood in Missouri with the cop getting angry that the teen was asking questions, so he tasered him for 20 seconds, sending the 17-year-old into cardiac arrest.
Independence police officer Timothy Runnels then yanked the boy out of the car, handcuffing him before picking him up and slamming him face first into a sidewalk, leaving the boy in a coma.
Runnels later claimed he had smelled marijuana in the car.

Already having been accused of murdering a prostitute, East Cleveland Police Detective Randy Hicks was drunk when he and another cop pulled Arnold Black over, accusing the 45-year-old Ohio man of possessing a kilo of cocaine because he was driving a truck similar to a known drug dealer.
When Hicks found no cocaine, he punched Black in the face two times while officer Jonathan O’Leary held him up, telling Black he was angry at having left the bar where he had been pounding drinks with friends.

Florida police officer Michael Harding had such a promising law enforcement career in front of him when he was named Officer of the Year while working for the Fort Pierce Police Department in 2011.
One year prior to that, he was presented with the Exceptional Police Service award for issuing 76 DUI citations.
But then his career started to falter after accepting a job with the Port St. Lucie Police Department just south of Fort Pierce in 2011.

A Houston cop was convicted by a jury last week and sentenced to the maximum of 20 years in prison for shooting a woman in the head during a road-rage incident while he was on paid leave for several other road-raging incidents.
He was also one of thousands of cops deemed mentally stable by a psychologist who this month pleaded guilty to not conducting face-to-face evaluations with police recruits.
In other words, there are probably many more like him patrolling the streets of Houston.

Two Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies were convicted this week for beating a mentally ill male inmate to “teach him a lesson” after he had mouthed off to jailers in March 2010.
Bryan Brunsting, 31, and Jason Branum, 35, were both convicted on counts of conspiracy, falsifying records and violating the inmate’s civil rights, marking a total of 21 Los Angeles sheriffs deputies to have been convicted of crimes since the federal government began investigating the largest jail system in the country in 2011.

It took less than three hours Wednesday for an Oklahoma jury to find a volunteer sheriff’s deputy guilty of manslaughter for shooting a man who was restrained and laying facedown beneath a pile of deputies.
Robert Bates, a wealthy 74-year-old insurance agent who would donate cash, trips and toys to the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office in exchange for dressing up as a deputy and joining them on drug raids, claimed he had shot the suspect by accident.

Having already received a $7,500 settlement for a wrongful arrest involving the recording of police in public , an Oregon man was surprised when a jury found him guilty for the same arrest Tuesday.
But Judge Stephen Bushong did not allow any mention of November’s settlement to be part of the trial.
Instead, the six-person jury heard testimony from several police officers that Fred Marlow IV was interfering with their investigation by standing on the property of his apartment complex recording them blasting their way into a home using flash grenades in September 2014.

The New York City police officer who shot and killed a man in a darkened stairwell after claiming he had fired his gun accidentally was spared jail time after a judge sentenced him to probation Tuesday.
Peter Liang, 28, was facing up to 15 years in prison after he was convicted for manslaughter and official misconduct in February.

A New York DA just recommended zero jail time for convicted NYPD cop Peter Liang, who fatally shot a man, and texted his union rep as the victim died rather than render assistance.
Liang shot and killed Akai Gurley in the stairwell of a housing project while on “vertical patrol” in 2014 and was later convicted of manslaughter and official misconduct.
Liang faced  15 years in prison.

A Maryland man convicted by a judge last year on questionable charges after a sheriff’s deputy accused his girlfriend of breastfeeding their unrestrained baby in the passengers’s seat as he pulled into a gas station had the conviction reversed on appeal last month after taking the case before a jury.
But the Charles County Sheriff’s Office is still refusing to return his girlfriend’s phone that recorded the incident.