The Slatest

Officer Who Killed Philando Castile During Traffic Stop Charged With Manslaughter

Pallbearers lead a march in St. Paul, Minnesota, after the funeral of Philando Castile on July 14.

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

The police officer who shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop on July 6 in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, has been charged with second-degree voluntary manslaughter, as well as two felony counts of dangerous discharge of a weapon. The news was announced at a press conference Wednesday by Ramsey County Attorney John Choi, who said the use of deadly force by the officer “was not justified.”

Choi said he made his decision after reviewing dashcam footage of the interaction between Castile and the officer who killed him, Jeronimo Yanez. According to Choi, Castile complied with Yanez’s instructions during the traffic stop, keeping his hands in sight before informing the officer, “calmly and in a non-threatening manner,” that he had a gun. (Castile had a license to carry his firearm, and his family provided a copy of his permit to media about a week after the shooting.) Choi said that Yanez responded by instructing Castile not to pull the gun out. Though Castile replied, “I’m not pulling it out,” Yanez repeated, this time screaming, “Don’t pull it out.” He then proceeded to fire seven shots. According to Choi, Castile’s final words were, “I wasn’t reaching for it.”

The dashcam footage Choi referred to has not been made public, though the ACLU has sued for its release. The aftermath of Castile’s fatal shooting was, however, captured on video by his girlfriend and streamed live on Facebook. The death of Castile, a 32-year-old black man, came during a particularly traumatic week, one that began with the shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and ended with the killing of five police officers in Dallas by a sniper who said he was motivated by a desire to kill white officers.

Before the shooting in Falcon Heights, which left Castile clinging to his life while his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter looked on, Yanez had said over his police radio that he was pulling Castile over because he matched the description of a robbery suspect. (Yanez, who is Latino, took particular note of Castile’s “wide-set nose.”) According to Choi, Yanez told investigators a day after the shooting that he had become scared for his life because he believed Castile was trying to block the officer’s view of his right hand. Choi, the prosecutor in Ramsey County, said at Wednesday’s press conference that expressing “subjective fear of death or great bodily harm” is “not enough” to legally justify the use of deadly force by a police officer. “I would submit that no reasonable officer knowing, seeing and hearing what Officer Yanez did at the time would have used deadly force under these circumstances,” Choi said.

Choi made the unusual decision to bring charges directly, instead of putting the case before a grand jury. In doing so he followed the lead of Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, who bypassed a grand jury in March when he chose not to bring charges against a pair of Minneapolis police officers who had been involved in the shooting of another black man, Jamal Clark.

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Yanez is the first Minnesota officer to be criminally charged in a police-involved death since 2000. In that time, the paper has reported, there have been more than 150 such incidents.

The law in Minnesota says that “the use of deadly force by a peace officer in the line of duty is justified only when necessary.” According to the law, deadly force can be considered necessary only in situations in which an officer must protect himself or others from death or great bodily harm; he has reason to believe a fleeing person has committed, or attempted to commit, a felony involving the use of deadly force; he has reason to believe that a fleeing felon “will cause death or great bodily harm if the person’s apprehension is delayed.”

News of the charges against Yanez comes days after the trial of Ray Tensing, an Ohio officer who killed a black man during a traffic stop, ended in a mistrial due to a deadlocked jury. Another trial, concerning the shooting death of Walter Scott by South Carolina officer Michael Slager, is ongoing.