New York City Government has agreed to pay US$3.9 million to the family of a black Bronx teenager shot to death by a white police officer in 2012.
The deal on Friday settled a US federal lawsuit brought by the family of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham.
“This was a tragic case,” New York Law Department spokesman Nicholas Paolucci said. “After evaluating all the facts, and consulting with key stakeholders such as the NYPD [New York Police Department], it was determined that settling the matter was in the best interest of the city.”
The family’s attorney Royce Russell said the family would comment tomorrow.
Graham died after he was shot once in the chest in February 2012 in a bathroom in the three-family home where he lived with his grandmother and other relatives.
Richard Haste — the officer who shot him — said he fired his weapon because he thought he was going to be shot.
No weapons were found in the apartment.
Haste was indicted on manslaughter charges in the summer of 2012, but charges were dismissed by a judge who said prosecutors improperly instructed grand jurors by implying they should disregard testimony from police officers that they radioed Haste in advance to warn him that they thought Graham had a pistol. A second grand jury declined to re-indict the officer.
Manhattan federal prosecutors are conducting a civil rights investigation.
The Graham shooting was cited during demonstrations after grand juries in Missouri and New York declined to indict police officers in the deaths last year of Michael Brown, 18, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson and Eric Garner, 43, on a Staten Island sidewalk after he was put in a chokehold when he was stopped on suspicion of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes. The deaths fueled the debate about policing and race in the US.
The Graham deal adds to a series of settlements in high-profile civil rights claims against police, jail officers and the city government under New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.
His administration reached a US$41 million settlement with the “Central Park Five” — men wrongly convicted in the vicious 1989 rape and beating of a Central Park jogger; a US$10 million deal with a Brooklyn man who spent 15 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of killing a rabbi, and a US$2.75 million settlement with the family of a city jail inmate who died after what his lawyers described as a beating in which jail officers kicked him in the head.
Word emerged on Friday of a US$5 million settlement with the family of a man killed in 1986 after being mistaken for a mobster with the same name; prosecutors said the incorrect information came from two former police detectives later convicted of moonlighting as hit men for the mob.
Meanwhile, New York Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office has pursued a strategy of settling major civil rights claims before lawsuits are filed.
They include a US$6.4 million agreement with a man whose murder conviction was overturned after he spent 23 years in prison and a US$2.25 million settlement with the family of a mentally ill former Marine who died after being left unattended for hours in a sweltering city jail cell.
Recently, Stringer said he would attempt to negotiate a settlement of a US$75 million civil rights claim from Garner’s family.
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