Killing of George Robinson

Killing of George Robinson
Date	January 13, 2019
Location	Jackson, Mississippi, US
Suspects	Desmond Barney, Lincoln Lampley, and Anthony Fox
Charges	Second-degree murder

Last updated October 01, 2022

On January 13, 2019, George Robinson, a 62-year-old Black man, died two days after a violent arrest by three Black police officers in Jackson, Mississippi. According to a grand jury indictment, the officers pulled Robinson out of a car, threw him headfirst into the pavement, and struck and kicked him multiple times in the head and chest. Robinson was treated at the scene but within hours lost consciousness and later died at a hospital. The state coroner ruled the death a homicide.

After an internal Jackson Police Department investigation cleared the officers of wrongdoing, one of the officers continued working for the Jackson Police Department, and the other two were hired by a police department in a nearby town. Following the George Floyd protests a year later, as well as a lengthy grand jury review, all three officers were indicted for second-degree murder on August 5, 2020.

People involved

George Robinson was a 62-year-old Black man.^[1]^[2]^[3]

Desmond Barney, 31 years old as of August 2020, Lincoln Lampley, 33, and Anthony Fox, 35, also Black,^[1] were officers in the Jackson Police Department's K-9 unit at the time of the killing.^[4] As of August 2020, Lampley is still an officer with the Jackson Police Department, and Barney and Fox are police officers in nearby Clinton, Mississippi.^[1]

Death

According to prosecutors, on January 13, 2019, Barney, Lampley, and Fox were canvassing in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi, looking for suspects in the fatal robbery of a pastor hours earlier.^[1]^[2]^[3] The officers saw Robinson sitting in his car in front of his house^[4] and approached him because they thought they had seen him dealing drugs earlier.^[1] They ordered him to exit his vehicle, but Robinson, a stroke victim, was slow to comply.^[1]^[3]^[4] According to the indictment, the officers pulled Robinson from his car, threw him headfirst onto the pavement, and struck and kicked him multiple times in the head and chest.^[1]^[2]^[3] The responding ambulance treated Robinson at the scene and released him.^[1] The officers arrested Robinson on misdemeanor charges of failing to obey a police officer and resisting arrest^[3] before releasing him with instructions to appear at a future court date.^[4] Within hours,^[1] Robinson's girlfriend saw him losing consciousness and called for another ambulance.^[3] Robinson died at a hospital on January 15.^[1]^[3]

The state coroner ruled the death a homicide.^[4] The coroner's report and other medical reports stated that Robinson died from blunt force trauma to the head and bleeding from the brain, and that he had several broken ribs.^[1]^[2]

Two other men were later arrested for the pastor's murder.^[4]

Prosecution

The three officers were placed on paid^[1]^[4] administrative leave while the Jackson Police Department's internal affairs division and the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated, and were later reinstated.^[2] After the Jackson Police Department's internal affairs division cleared the officers of wrongdoing and "multiple agencies looked into the incident and advised that no criminal conduct occurred", Barney and Fox were hired by the police department of nearby Clinton, Mississippi, according to Clinton's mayor.^[1] Lampley continued to be employed by the Jackson Police Department.^[1]

On August 5, 2020, all three officers were indicted for second-degree murder.^[2] The three officers posted bond and were freed pending trial.^[1] Lampley was placed on desk duty by the Jackson Police Department,^[3] and Barney and Fox were "assigned other duties" at the Clinton Police Department.^[1]

On May 20, 2021 all charges against Barney and Lampley were dismissed in a rare "directed verdict". The charges were dismissed with prejudice, an outcome welcomed by the Clinton Police Department.^[5]^[6]

Robinson's family has filed a civil suit against the city, the three police officers, and the ambulance company that treated Robinson at the scene and released him.^[1]^[3]

On August 4, 2022, Fox was found guilty of culpable negligence manslaughter. On August 17 he was sentenced to five years in prison.^[7]

Impact

A march was held shortly after Robinson's death.^[4]

According to The New York Times , the officers were charged "amid intense scrutiny of police brutality after the killing in May of George Floyd in the custody of the Minneapolis police".^[1] United Press International reported, "The indictment comes as police departments across the country consider reforms in policing in the wake of protests against excessive force and racial bias."^[3] However, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba stated that the indictment of the three police officers actually built on a police accountability policy the city adopted in October 2018 which requires all cases of people who died in the custody of the Jackson police to be turned over the district attorney for a grand jury review.^[1]

Related Research Articles

The Baltimore Police Department (BPD) provides police services to the city of Baltimore, Maryland. The department is organized into nine districts. It polices 80.9 square miles (210 km²) of land and 11.1 square miles (29 km²) of waterways. The department is sometimes referred to as the Baltimore City Police Department to distinguish it from the Baltimore County Police Department.

The 1980 Miami riots were race riots that occurred in Miami, Florida, starting in earnest on May 18, 1980, following an all-White male jury acquitting four Dade County Public Safety Department officers in the death of Arthur McDuffie, a Black insurance salesman and United States Marine Corps lance corporal. McDuffie was beaten to death by four police officers after a traffic stop. After the officers were tried and acquitted on charges including manslaughter and evidence tampering, a riot broke out in the Black neighborhoods of Overtown and Liberty City on the night of May 17. Riots continued until May 20, resulting in at least 18 deaths and an estimated $100 million in property damage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dallas Police Department</span> Dallas, Texas law enforcement agency

The Dallas Police Department, established in 1881, is the principal law enforcement agency serving the city of Dallas, Texas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of James Craig Anderson</span> Murder case

James Craig Anderson was a 47-year-old African American man who was murdered in a hate crime in Jackson, Mississippi on June 26, 2011, by 18-year-old Deryl Dedmon of Brandon. At the time of his death, Anderson was working on the assembly line at the Nissan plant in Canton, and raising an adopted son with his partner.

On April 4, 2015, Walter Scott, a 50-year old black man, was fatally shot by Michael Slager, a local police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina. Slager had stopped Scott for a non-functioning brake light. Slager was charged with murder after a video surfaced showing him shooting Scott from behind while Scott was fleeing, which contradicted Slager's report of the incident. The racial difference led many to believe that the shooting was racially motivated, generating a widespread controversy.

On April 12, 2015, Freddie Carlos Gray Jr., a 25-year-old African American, was arrested by the Baltimore Police Department over his legal possession of a knife. While being transported in a police van, Gray sustained injuries and was taken to the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. Gray died on April 19, 2015; his death was ascribed to injuries to his spinal cord.

On July 19, 2015, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Samuel DuBose, an unarmed man, was fatally shot by Ray Tensing, a University of Cincinnati police officer, during a traffic stop for a missing front license plate and a suspended driver's license.

The shooting of Anthony Hill, a U.S. Air Force veteran, occurred on March 9, 2015, in Chamblee, Georgia, near Atlanta. Hill, fatally shot by police officer Robert Olsen, suffered from mental illness and was naked and unarmed at the time of the incident. The incident was covered in local and national press and sparked the involvement of Black Lives Matter and other advocacy groups who demonstrated their anger at the shooting. In January 2016, a grand jury indicted officer Olsen on two counts of felony murder and one count of aggravated assault. Nearing the fourth anniversary of the homicide, it was decided that Olsen's trial would be rescheduled for September 23, 2019, with delays including three successive judges having recused themselves in the case.

Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels, two black men, were lynched on April 13, 1937, in Duck Hill, Mississippi by a white mob after being labeled as the murderers of a white storekeeper. They had only been legally accused of the crime a few minutes before they were kidnapped from the courthouse, chained to trees, and tortured with a blow torch. Following the torture, McDaniels was shot to death and Townes was burned alive.

On the night of September 6, 2018, off-duty Dallas Police Department patrol officer Amber Guyger entered the Dallas, Texas, apartment of 26-year-old accountant Botham Jean and fatally shot him. Guyger, who said that she had entered the apartment believing it was her own and believed Jean to be a burglar, was initially charged with manslaughter. The absence of a murder charge led to protests and accusations of racial bias, since Jean was black and unarmed and was killed in his home by a white off-duty officer who had apparently disregarded police protocols. On November 30, 2018, Guyger was indicted on a charge of murder. On October 1, 2019, she was found guilty of murder, and was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment the following day. The ruling was upheld on appeal in 2021.

The killing of Greg Gunn occurred on the morning of February 25, 2016, in Montgomery, Alabama. Gunn, a 58-year-old African-American man, was shot and killed near his home after fleeing from a stop-and-frisk initiated by Aaron Cody Smith, a white police officer. Smith was charged with murder and indicted by a grand jury in 2016. The case came to trial in late 2019 following a change of venue to Ozark, Alabama. Smith was found guilty of manslaughter, and, in January 2020, was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was murdered in the U.S. city of Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, a 44-year-old white police officer. Floyd had been arrested on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill. Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for over nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face-down in a street. Two other police officers, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane, assisted Chauvin in restraining Floyd. Lane had also pointed a gun at Floyd's head prior to Floyd being put in handcuffs. A fourth police officer, Tou Thao, prevented bystanders from intervening.

Derek Michael Chauvin is an American former police officer who was convicted for the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Chauvin was a member of the Minneapolis Police Department from 2001 to 2020.

On August 5, 2016, Jamarion Rashad Robinson, a 26-year-old African American man who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, was shot 59 times and killed in a police raid in East Point, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. The shooting occurred when at least 14 officers of a Southeast Regional Fugitive Taskforce from at least seven different agencies, led by U.S. Marshals, forcibly entered the apartment of Robinson's girlfriend to serve a warrant for his arrest. The warrant was being served on behalf of the Gwinnett County police and the Atlanta Police Department, and authorities said they had sought his arrest for attempted arson and aggravated assault of a police officer. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) stated that Robinson had been repeatedly ordered to put down a weapon by officers and that he had reportedly fired at them three times.

"I can't breathe" is a slogan associated with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. The phrase originates from the last words of Eric Garner, an unarmed man who was killed in 2014 after being put in a chokehold by a New York City Police Officer. A number of other Black Americans, such as Javier Ambler, Manuel Ellis, Elijah McClain, and George Floyd, have said the same phrase prior to dying during similar law-enforcement encounters. According to a 2020 report by The New York Times, the phrase has been used by over 70 people who died in police custody.

On June 2, 2020, David Dorn, a 77-year-old retired police captain, was fatally shot after interrupting the burglary of a pawn shop in The Ville, St. Louis. The incident occurred on the same night as protests in St. Louis, Missouri over the murder of George Floyd. 24-year-old Stephan Cannon was convicted of his murder in July 20, 2022.

In late May and early June 2020, two ambush-style attacks occurred against security personnel and law enforcement officers in California. The attacks left two dead and injured three others.

Elijah Jovan McClain was a 23-year-old African-American massage therapist from Aurora, Colorado, who died while being arrested by local police.

False rumors of a police shooting resulted in rioting, arson, and looting in the U.S. city of Minneapolis from August 26–28, 2020. The events began as a reaction to the suicide of Eddie Sole Jr., a 38-year old black man who was being pursued by Minneapolis police officers for his alleged involvement in a homicide. At approximately 2 p.m. on August 26, Sole died after he shot himself in the head as officers approached to arrest him. False rumors quickly spread on social media that Minneapolis police officers had fatally shot Sole. To quell unrest, Minneapolis police released closed-circuit television surveillance footage that captured Sole's suicide, which was later confirmed by a Hennepin County Medical Examiner's autopsy report.

References

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Levenson, Michael; Fazio, Marie (August 14, 2020). "3 Mississippi Police Officers Charged With Murder of Black Man". The New York Times . Retrieved August 16, 2020.
1 2 3 4 5 6 "3 Mississippi police officers indicted in death of Black man". Associated Press . August 14, 2020. Retrieved August 16, 2020.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Haynes, Danielle (August 15, 2020). "3 Mississippi officers charged with murder". United Press International . Retrieved August 16, 2020.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Autopsy: Man's death after encounter with police a homicide". Associated Press . January 23, 2019. Retrieved August 16, 2020.
↑ "Charges dismissed with prejudice against 2 officers accused in death of George Robinson - Darkhorse Press". May 20, 2021.
↑ Levenson, Michael (May 20, 2021). "Judge Drops Murder Charges Against Two Officers Accused of Body-Slamming Man". The New York Times . Retrieved July 22, 2021.
↑ Emery, Holly; Carter, Josh (August 17, 2022). "Former JPD officer Anthony Fox sentenced to 5 years in death of George Robinson". WLBT NBC 3. Retrieved September 30, 2022.