A Hamilton County jury described as all or mostly white found three Memphis officers not guilty last week in the death of Tyre Nichols following allegations of systematic exclusion of minorities in the jury selection process here.
Former Memphis officers Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley and Justin Smith were acquitted May 7 of second-degree murder and other charges in connection with the January 2023 fatal beating of Tyre Nichols during a traffic stop.
Simply by looking at the jurors who reached this verdict, people can see it wasn’t a jury of peers for the defendants or Nichols, said former Memphis police commander Thaddeus Johnson, now a Council on Criminal Justice senior fellow and criminologist at Georgia State University.
“It’s Black defendants in a Black city with a Black victim or Black person that was killed,” Johnson said by phone.
At the request of the defense, a jury was selected from the Chattanooga area, brought to Memphis and sequestered for the trial. Shelby County Criminal Court Judge James Jones Jr. told over 100 potential jurors in the lobby of the Hamilton County Courthouse on April 23 not to look up any case details or review any news media, as Nichols’ case garnered significant attention.