Johannes Mehserle, 4 other BART officers cleared (beating case before Oscar Grant)

[alp227]

Source: SF Chronicle

A federal court jury on Thursday cleared five BART police officers, including Johannes Mehserle, of using excessive force against a passenger who was thrown to the ground and injured after an angry confrontation at an Oakland transit station in November 2008.

Kenneth Carrethers, 43, of Oakland accused the officers of beating him, then hog-tying him and taking him to jail on bogus charges in retaliation for his profanity-laced tirade against the police for failing to prevent burglaries of his car in the Coliseum Station parking lot.

The officers said they held and subdued Carrethers after he approached one of them from behind with his fists clenched and raised.

After about five hours of deliberations, the seven-member jury found unanimously that Carrethers had failed to prove the officers used excessive force or punished him for exercising his right of free speech.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/01/BAI01M73QE.DTL

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I only heard of this case when the federal trial began. The background incident:

Carrethers was returning from his job at a San Francisco hotel on the night of Nov. 15, 2008, when he saw a group of officers in the Coliseum Station and started telling another passenger how lazy and worthless they were.

Mehserle spoke up - telling him to mind his own business, according to Carrethers, or trying to calm him down, according to Mehserle. Carrethers then cursed at the officers and said he would fight them if they were civilians.

OK, here's the problem. Use fighting words, lose the case.

[demosincebirth]

1. Cops may have over reacted, but the guy should have, definitely, kept his mouth shut.

[AtheistCrusader]

2. Not shut his mouth.

Just not expressed something that could be unambiguously determined to be a threat.

He played right into their hands, and made it difficult, if not impossible to raise a credible defense for him.