NYC cop convicted of manslaughter in stairwell shooting

A rookie police officer who shot an unarmed man dead in a darkened public housing stairwell was convicted Thursday of manslaughter in a case closely watched by advocates for police accountability.

The courtroom audience gasped and Officer Peter Liang, who had broken into tears as he testified about the 2014 shooting of Akai Gurley, buried his head in his hands as the verdict came after 17 hours of jury deliberations. Liang is the first New York City police officer convicted in an on-duty death since 2005.

The manslaughter charge, a felony, carries up to 15 years in prison, though no requirement for any prison time. Liang was dismissed from the New York Police Department right after the verdict. His sentencing is April 14.

But an uncertainty remains: Brooklyn state Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun has yet to rule on Liang's lawyers' request to dismiss the charges; Liang also was convicted of official misconduct, a misdemeanor.

Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson said "justice was done" for Gurley.

"He was an innocent man who was killed by a police officer who violated his training," said Thompson, whose mother was a police officer.

But Liang's lawyers said they struggled to understand how the jury could find him guilty for a shooting he said happened accidentally in a pitch-dark stairway.

"If that's not a time to pull out your gun, I don't know when is," said defense lawyer Robert Brown, who said Liang would appeal. NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton said shortly after the shooting that the evidence pointed to an "accidental discharge" of Liang's weapon.

Internal disciplinary proceedings were initiated against Liang's partner, who was not charged criminally and testified in the case. Liang, who remains free on bail, left the courthouse without comment.

Gurley's death in November 2014 added fuel to a nationwide series of protests against police killings of unarmed black men. Just days after Gurley was killed, a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in the Aug. 9 fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.

One week after that grand jury decided against indicting Wilson, a Staten Island grand jury returned no indictment for the NYPD officer who killed Eric Garner, another unarmed black man, by placing him in a chokehold. Like Gurley, Brown and Garner were black and unarmed.

Thompson cautioned that Liang's case shouldn't be commingled with others. But relatives of other New Yorkers killed in police encounters had joined Gurley's family outside court during the trial to call for police accountability.

"I just want to say thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone," Gurley's mother, Sylvia Palmer, said after the officer's conviction.

Meanwhile, supporters of Liang, who is Chinese-American, have said he has been made a scapegoat for past injustices.

And the head of Liang's union, Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch, said in a statement that the verdict "will have a chilling effect on police officers across the city because it criminalizes a tragic accident."

Lynch wasn't in court for the verdict. While New York police officers often fill rows of courtroom seats when one of their own faces charges, few officers appeared in court during Liang's trial.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said he respected the jury's decision and hoped it would bring Gurley's family some sense of finality.

The last officer convicted in a killing in the line of duty was Brian Conroy. He was found guilty in 2005 of criminally negligent homicide in the shooting of Ousmane Zongo, an African immigrant, during a police raid. Conroy was sentenced to probation and 500 hours of community service.

Liang and his partner were patrolling a public housing high-rise in Brooklyn with his gun drawn when he fired. The bullet ricocheted off a wall and hit the 28-year-old Gurley on a lower floor.

Prosecutors said Liang handled his gun recklessly, must have realized from the noise that someone was nearby and did almost nothing to help Gurley.

While Liang's trial unfolded, two other New York police officers, Patrick Espeut and Diara Cruz, were shot and wounded during a similar stairwell patrol in a different public housing complex. The gunman later killed himself. The judge barred any mention of those shootings in Liang's trial.

The Associated Press