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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
The US government has banned US government personnel in China, as well as family members and contractors with security clearances, from any romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, The Associated Press (AP) has learned. Four people with direct knowledge of the matter told the AP about the policy, which was put into effect by departing US ambassador Nicholas Burns in January shortly before he left China. The people would speak only on condition of anonymity to discuss details of a confidential directive. Although some US agencies already had strict rules on such relationships, a blanket “nonfraternization” policy, as it is known, has
OPTIONS: Asked if one potential avenue to a third term was having J.D. Vance run for the top job and then pass the baton to him, Trump said: ‘That’s one,’ among others US President Donald Trump on Sunday that “I’m not joking” about trying to serve a third term, the clearest indication he is considering ways to breach a constitutional barrier against continuing to lead the country after his second term ends at the beginning of 2029. “There are methods which you could do it,” Trump said in a telephone interview with NBC News from Mar-a-Lago, his private club. He elaborated later to reporters on Air Force One from Florida to Washington that “I have had more people ask me to have a third term, which in a way is a fourth term
RSS