Closing arguments set in Albuquerque police shooting case

An Albuquerque, New Mexico, police officer and a former detective will stand trial in the 2014 shooting death of a homeless man, a judge ruled Tuesday.

As a result, he said, the officers could be acquitted if defense lawyers can persuade jurors that they were afraid at the time 38-year-old James Boyd was fatally shot in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains.

Video of the shooting shows Boyd appearing to surrender before Perez and Sandy open fire.

Fox said police determined the standoff was a SWAT situation because the knife-wielding Boyd was on higher ground and put officers in danger.

Perez and Sandy will be arraigned, booked into jail and then go before a judge who will set bond and other conditions of release pending trial. The rest are still in court proceedings. When Judge Candelaria asked APD criminalistics detective Nathan Render if he requested their videos, he replied, “I don’t believe so”.

On the third day of the hearing, defense attorneys moved to dismiss all charges.

Police were forced to use tear gas to breakup demonstrations later in the year in Albuquerque before the nation watched similar scenes in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white police officer killed an unarmed 18-year-old black man.

Police critics and authorities had been closely watching the preliminary hearing because it’s the only time Albuquerque police officers have faced charges in any of the shootings since 2010. An autopsy also confirmed that Boyd was shot in the back.

“How can the state prosecute an officer for murder when the officer was following his training?”

“Of course it’s not a joke because he went forward and actually shot him”, Kennedy said.

The next step in the case will be the arraignment, the official reading of the charges, for Sandy and Perez. The cops claim the James Boyd shooting was justified since they were acting in self-defense. Because of how close he was to Boyd, and with Boyd perched above him on a rocky slope, Weimerskirch said, he dropped to one knee because he knew his fellow officers would shoot Boyd.

The Department of Justice report, published less than a month after Boyd was shot, found that a significant number of the use-of-force cases the DOJ reviewed involved people with a mental illness or in crisis.

A federal judge recently approved an agreement between the city and Justice Department to revamp police policies and assign a federal monitor to make sure changes are made.