CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Attorneys for a white former police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man during a traffic stop are asking a judge to release him from jail before his murder trial because he poses no threat to the public.
“In a case like this, you have got the video tape, which regardless of what he says about what the tape really shows, shows him shooting a man repeatedly in the back,” Savitz said, referring to a bystander’s cellphone video that captured Slager firing eight times as the 50-year-old Scott ran away.
“It would take a very courageous judge to let him out under the circumstances. If the judge lets him out, and Charleston just goes up in flames, they’re going to blame the judge. No judge wants to be responsible for additional violence.”
Scott was killed April 4, about two months before the shooting deaths of nine black parishoners at a Charleston church and the arrest of a white suspect in that case. Both cases have heightened racial tensions in the coastal city.
Slager, 33, has been in solitary confinement since his arrest. He was fired after the shooting, which inflamed the national debate about how blacks are treated by law officers.
Slager faces 30 years to life without parole if convicted of murder. There were no aggravating circumstances such as robbery or kidnapping, so the death penalty doesn’t apply in the case, prosecutor Scarlett Wilson has said.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Scott’s family called for peace, an act some have credited — along with the officer’s speedy arrest — with staving off the protests and violence that have erupted in other cities where black men have died during encounters with police. But, if Slager is released, some community leaders said that could change rapidly, forecasting an uneasy situation that could mean protests.
“We cannot continue to give grace, we cannot continue to be forgiving, unless we see that the other side of the fence is willing to work along with us, to see things our way,” Thomas Dixon of People United Take Back Our Community said at a news conference Wednesday in front of the jail where Slager is being held. “In the event that there is no grace, I guarantee you, the days of grace in Charleston soon will expire. What’s beyond that, I’m not sure.”
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Associated Press writers Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina, and Jeffrey Collins in Charleston contributed to this report.
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