Judge O'Donnell just announced his verdict in the Michael Brelo trial.
Not Guilty.
Judge O'Donnell also accepted as proved Brelo's claims of justification regarding the lesser included offenses.
The charges were manslaughter and felonious assault in the shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams on November 29, 2012. Brelo was a Cleveland police officer at the time and was one of 13 officers who shot 137 rounds at Russell and Williams. Background information is available here.
Like any criminal charge, the prosecution was required to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Judge O'Donnell found that the prosecution did not meet its burden on the manslaughter charges.
The prosecution did prove felonious assault, but Brelo was nevertheless acquitted because of his successful assertion of justification as a defense. Brelo bore the burden of proof on this defense by the lower preponderance of the evidence standard.
A few initial observations:
Judge O'Donnell spent an extraordinary amount of time reading the bases for his verdict. He even left the bench to use the visual aids, talking about specific entry wounds, which were fatal, and their angles of entry.
Regarding Timothy Russell, the judge "found beyond a reasonable doubt that fired a shot that by itself would have caused Russell's death." He added, however, that voluntary manslaughter additionally requires that Brelo's "shot alone actually caused the death or that it was 'the straw that broke the camel's back,'" meaning that Brelo's shot would have to have exacerbated potentially survivable shots, thus causing the death. (The judge's discussion regarding Malissa Williams is a bit confusing, requiring a closer reading of the verdict.)
The judge also discussed testimony about the unreasonableness of Brelo's jumping on the hood of the car to fire. He stated that the law requires him to look at the totality of the circumstances and that, even if that one act was unreasonable (which the judge's view on that needs a closer look) the defense of justification isn't defeated by that one aspect.
More to come. I'm going to look for the decision and transcript.
UPDATE: You can get the written verdict here. The verdict is the entry at the top of the docket entries at that link. The document opens as a .tif file and I don't know how to include those in a diary.
UPDATE x2: For way more detail, see jpmasser's diary here.
Update x3: Because, yes, we've got to find a way:
