5 former Memphis officers charged in Tyre Nichols's death plead not guilty
Five former Memphis police officers charged in the death of Tyre Nichols — the 29-year-old Black man who died after being brutally beaten during a traffic stop last month — pleaded not guilty Friday to all charges, including second-degree murder.
In the first court appearance since their arrest, the officers — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Desmond Mills Jr., Emmitt Martin III and Justin Smith — each waived the formal reading of their indictments and entered pleas through their attorneys.
In addition to second-degree murder, the officers, who were part of a crime-suppression team known as the SCORPION Unit, were also charged with aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression. They were arrested on Jan. 26 and are out on bond.
Memphis authorities released 67 minutes of surveillance and police body camera footage showing the chaotic Jan. 7 encounter in which the five officers chase Nichols, punch him, spray him with pepper spray, and continue both physical and verbal abuse as he grows increasingly limp.
Nichols — a FedEx driver, avid skateboarder and father of a 4-year-old son — died in a hospital three days later.
A New York Times analysis of the video found that officers shouted at least 71 commands that were “confusing, conflicting and sometimes even impossible to obey” during the approximately 13-minute period before they reported over the radio that Nichols was in custody.
The five officers were fired on Jan. 20, following an internal investigation into Nichols’s arrest.
One other officer who was involved in the initial traffic stop, Preston Hemphill, has been fired. Three other officers, including two Shelby County sheriff’s deputies who failed to keep their body cameras on, have been suspended.
Three Memphis Fire Department employees who were present at the site of the arrest have also been fired.
The death of Nichols was the latest high-profile case to lead to protests across the United States and renew the national conversation around racial injustice and police brutality.
The footage of the five officers brutally assaulting Nichols drew comparisons to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department officers during a traffic stop in 1991.
The officers charged in Nichols’s death were Black. The officer who murdered Floyd was white. Three of the four officers charged in King’s beating were white.
King survived his ordeal, and four officers were acquitted of assaulting him in verdicts that resulted in days of rioting.
“That was a watershed moment for America,” Ben Crump, the noted civil rights attorney representing the Nichols family, said last month.“And I believe this video is a watershed moment for America. The only question that remains is, how much progress have we made?”
King’s daughter, Lora King, said she watched the video of Nichols’s beating and was sickened by what she saw.
“I still don't feel well,” King said in an interview with CNN. “I don't wish that upon an animal, let alone any human being.
At the funeral for Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Vice President Kamala Harris called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, and end qualified immunity for law enforcement
In his fiery eulogy, the Rev. Al Sharpton singled out the officers charged in Nichols’s death.
“You don’t fight crime by becoming criminals yourself,” he said. "You don't stand up to thugs in the street [by] becoming thugs yourself. You don't fight gangs by becoming five armed men against an unarmed man. That ain't the police, that's punks."
