Ray Tensing, the former campus police officer who fatally shot a black motorist in Cincinnati last year, will face a second murder trial after his first one ended earlier this month in a deadlocked jury, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters announced Tuesday.
The case against Tensing, who shot 43-year-old Sam DuBose in the head after pulling him over for a missing license plate, was strong enough to convince eight of the 12 jurors in his first trial to support a manslaughter conviction, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. But after 25 hours of deliberations, the jurors—six white men, four white women, and two black women—informed the judge they could not come to a unanimous verdict, and he declared a mistrial.
Tensing’s defense was that he became scared for his life when DuBose, who was unarmed, started driving away from him. But video footage of the incident indicates that Tensing took out his gun and fired before DuBose’s car began moving. (According to an analysis of the footage commissioned by the University of Cincinnati, “it is difficult to determine with precision how much, if at all, the car moved, but whatever movement may have occurred appears to have been minimal.”) That video footage, which was captured with Tensing’s body camera, can be seen here.
Deters, the prosecutor in the first trial, said he would request a change of venue, saying Columbus or Cleveland might be better places to try Tensing than Cincinnati.
Tensing’s lawyer, Stew Mathews, told the Enquirer, “I talked to Ray, we both knew it was coming. That was no surprise, but Ray is disappointed.”*
Convicting a police officer of murder or manslaughter for using deadly force in the line of duty is extremely difficult from a legal standpoint. In Ohio, the relevant law is not even formally on the books. Rather, it comes from judicial interpretations of a civil standard established by the Supreme Court that says a police officer cannot use deadly force unless he “has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”
*Correction, Nov. 22, 2016: This post originally misidentified Stew Mathews as Stew Matthew.
