3 Former Officers Acquitted of Most Serious Charge in Tyre Nichols’s Death

The former officers were found guilty of witness tampering but not of the charge that would have held them responsible for causing his death.

Three former Memphis police officers were found guilty on Thursday of federal witness tampering charges in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man. But all three defendants were acquitted of the more serious charge of violating his civil rights by causing his death.

One officer, Demetrius Haley, was convicted on a lesser charge of violating Mr. Nichols’s civil rights by causing bodily injury.

The three defendants — Mr. Haley, Tadarrius Bean and Justin Smith — and two other former officers who pleaded guilty to their role in the violence, still face additional state charges, including second-degree murder.

The mixed verdict in the federal trial in Memphis comes nearly two years after Mr. Nichols’s death, which sickened many across the nation, who viewed it as the latest example of a young Black man being subjected to excessive force at the hands of the police.

Video of the January 2023 encounter showed that after Mr. Nichols fled a traffic stop, officers viciously punched and kicked him, ignoring his cries for his mother and his attempts to comply with a barrage of conflicting commands. None of the officers reported the extent of the beating.

Sentencing on the federal convictions is expected to occur in January, with the witness tampering charge carrying a sentence of up to 20 years in prison. The most serious charge could have led to a life sentence.

After the verdicts were read, Mr. Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, and his stepfather, Rodney Wells, said they were pleased that the three officers were now in custody, having been escorted out of the courtroom by U.S. marshals.

“I’m actually in shock right now,” Ms. Wells said, “because I still can’t believe all this stuff is going on, that they all have been convicted.”

Mr. Wells added: “We’re all very, very happy that these guys have been put in jail. This is a long time coming.”

The trial, which lasted more than three weeks, exposed a culture of secrecy and violence within the Memphis Police Department, where officers held to an unspoken agreement that they could punish anyone who fled from them and downplay the violence. The five officers — all of whom are Black — were part of a team within the specialized Scorpion street crime unit, where arrest statistics and confiscations were a priority.

Mr. Nichols, a FedEx worker who loved photography and skateboarding and was the father of a young child, had been driving home from work on Jan. 7, 2023, when he was stopped by the officers. Yanked from his car, he faced a series of conflicting and aggressive commands and was hit with pepper spray and fired at with a stun gun before he broke away and ran toward his mother’s home.

He was stopped down the street from the house, where more officers arrived, punching and kicking him. Propped up against a police car, Mr. Nichols sat in the street for minutes without medical aid before an ambulance was called.

Over the course of two weeks, federal prosecutors summoned several former and current Memphis police officers, as well as many of the medical staff members who responded to Mr. Nichols when he arrived at the hospital shortly after the beating.

They also repeatedly played a compilation of body camera and surveillance footage, first released in the weeks after the traffic stop, that showed the beating, Mr. Nichols’s pained cries for his mother and some of the upbeat conversations that came after.

“You know what these officers did and know it because you saw it over and over again,” said Kathryn Gilbert, a Justice Department lawyer, in closing statements. “You can use your eyes. You can use your ears. You can use your common sense. You know what these officers did.”

The most dramatic moments came when the two former officers who pleaded guilty to their roles in the violence took the stand, a requirement of their plea agreements with the federal government. As prosecutors played clips from body camera footage, the two men each paused to identify each voice and violation of their police training, while their three former colleagues sat across the room.

Emmitt Martin III, who stopped Mr. Nichols for speeding up to beat a red light and then changing lanes without a turn signal, described his anger and frustration when Mr. Nichols broke free from officers. He also outlined an unspoken agreement to not tell their superior officers about the extra kicks and punches.

“I knew they weren’t going to tell on me,” Mr. Martin said. “And I wasn’t going to tell on them.”

And Desmond Mills Jr. broke down into sobs after watching the videos of the men restraining Mr. Nichols’s arms, hitting him with a baton and winding up for a devastating kick to his limp body.

“It hurt inside so much. I felt bad every time his picture is on the screen — to know I’m part of that,” Mr. Mills said.

“I made his child fatherless,” he added. “I’m sorry.”

Prosecutors recommended up to 40 years in prison for Mr. Martin and up to 15 years for Mr. Mills.

Through the duration of the trial, Mr. Nichols’s family kept vigil inside and outside the courtroom. At times, his mother slipped out to avoid the cries and punches captured on video or sat in pained silence, her husband shielding her eyes from the photos of her son’s body.

Lawyers for the three men built separate cases in an attempt to defend their clients. They sought to sow doubt about the quality of training the officers received and the varying degrees of culpability for their actions. They also sought to divert blame to Mr. Martin and Mr. Mills.

Prosecutors built the strongest case against Mr. Haley, whose partnership with Mr. Martin earned the two the nickname of “the Smash Brothers” for their aggressive nature while on patrol. The prosecutors outlined previous instances where Mr. Haley had used violence against someone in police custody, and brought in as a witness a former girlfriend of Mr. Haley’s who had received a text from him with an image of Mr. Nichols’s bloodied body.

Mr. Haley was also captured on video footage delivering a harsh kick to Mr. Nichols. Mr. Bean and Mr. Smith, who helped restrain Mr. Nichols, did not deliver blows of the same force, but internal police forms, as well as informal testimony they gave to law enforcement officials, helped cement their efforts to cover up the violence.

Stephen Leffler, a lawyer for Mr. Haley, acknowledged that his client had kicked Mr. Nichols, but argued that it was within the scope of police training because it landed on an arm, rather than Mr. Nichols’s head. He also framed Mr. Haley’s call to “beat that man” as a verbal warning, not a sign of anything more nefarious.

Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, emphasized in a statement that all five of the former officers had now been convicted of federal felonies.

“Tyre Nichols should be alive today,” she said.

On the mixed verdict, Seth Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, said that prosecutors faced an uphill battle in proving the officers had violated Mr. Nichols’s civil rights by causing his death.

“It is always a very hard charge to prosecute — all the defense has to do is create reasonable doubt that it was an honest mistake,” he said.

Left unanswered is whether policing will change in Memphis, a city still wounded from years of high crime rates and the violent tendencies within a department tasked with protecting it.

State Representative Justin J. Pearson, who represents Memphis and the surrounding county, said the trial “really exposed some fundamental policy changes and practices that need to be done immediately.”

“We need to go cry, we need to go and be together, and we need to celebrate Tyre’s life, and we have to continue to commit ourselves to justice and the work ahead,” he said.

But the Republican-dominated State Legislature has overridden some of the city’s attempts to reform the department’s policies, while the Justice Department is continuing to investigate the Police Department.

“Though people might be inclined to believe we’ve turned the page on police immunity when it comes to police brutality, history would suggest otherwise,” said Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“This is accountability, not justice,” he added. “Justice would be a system that doesn’t so reliably hurt the people that it’s meant to protect.”