Ex-officer who mistook a Black man's keys and phone for a gun gets 15 years to life for murder
Former Columbus officer Adam Coy shot Hill four times in a garage in December 2020, as the country reckoned with a series of police killings of Black men, women and children. He told jurors that he feared for his life because he thought Hill was holding a silver revolver.
Coy, who is being treated for Hodgkin lymphoma, told the court Monday he plans to appeal the verdict.
'I feel my actions were justified,' Coy said. 'I reacted the same way I had in hundreds of training scenarios. I drew and fired my weapon to stop a threat, protect myself and my partner.'
Prosecutors said Hill followed police commands and was never a threat to Coy.
In victim impact statements Monday, Hill's sisters and ex-wife described the 47-year-old as a gentle man who had never met a stranger. His grandchildren called him 'Big Daddy.'
Police body camera footage showed Hill coming out of the garage of a friend's house holding up a cellphone in his left hand, his right hand not visible, seconds before he was fatally shot. Almost 10 minutes passed before officers at the scene rendered aid.
Coy, who was fired afterward, had a lengthy history of citizen complaints, although most were declared unfounded. Weeks later, the mayor forced out the police chief after a series of fatal police shootings of Black people.
Columbus later reached a $10 million settlement with Hill's family, and the city passed a law requiring police to give immediate medical attention to injured suspects.
The local Fraternal Order of Police chapter said it would continue to support Coy, for both his sake and that of every officer who 'acts in good faith' under department protocols.
'While this incident was a heart-rending mistake, it wasn't murder,' said Brian Steel, president of FOP Capital City Lodge 9.
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NBC News
2 hours ago
- NBC News
Tennessee man with heart device to be executed despite concerns it may shock him
A Tennessee death row inmate is scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday morning despite concerns from his lawyers that his heart device could repeatedly shock him and expose him to unconstitutional suffering. Byron Black is poised to be put to death at 10 a.m. at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville after the U.S. Supreme Court and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee declined Monday to intervene. Lawyers for Black had petitioned the Supreme Court to halt the procedure based on a claim that he is mentally incompetent and therefore should not be executed because it would violate his constitutional rights. In addition, the lawyers asked the high court to review whether proceeding with his execution without first deactivating his implantable cardioverter defibrillator, or ICD, would defy the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court denied the requests Monday. Kelley Henry, one of Black's lawyers, called on Lee to step in to prevent "risking a grotesque spectacle by executing Byron Black." The governor said he would not show leniency. "The courts have universally determined that it is lawful to carry out the jury's sentence of execution given to Mr. Black for the heinous murders of Angela Clay and her daughters Lakeisha, age 6, and Latoya, age 9," Lee said in a statement. "Accordingly, I do not plan to intervene." Last month, the Davidson County Chancery Court ruled in favor of Black, 69, to have his device disabled before his execution after his lawyers argued that the ICD — which is designed to deliver electric shocks to those with dangerously fast heartbeats — might try to restore his heart to a regular rhythm as he is put to death by the drug pentobarbital. Black could be "subject to the severe pain and suffering of having his heart repeatedly shocked back into rhythm during his execution," they said in a court filing. But the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the ruling Thursday, finding that the chancery court did not have the authority to issue a decision that would effectively halt an execution. Still, the state justices said, there was nothing to stop the state and lawyers from working out a plan to deactivate the ICD. However, state Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti vowed in a statement last week to move ahead with the execution. He also disputed that Black is intellectually disabled or would suffer severe pain if he were executed. "Our office will continue fighting to seek justice for the Clay family," Skrmetti said, "and to hold Black accountable for his horrific crimes." Black was convicted in the 1988 fatal shooting of his girlfriend, Angela Clay, 29, and daughters Latoya and Lakeisha. At the time of the killings, Black had been on work release as part of his jail sentence for shooting Clay's estranged husband, Bennie Clay, about 15 months earlier. Angela Clay's sister told Nashville police that Black had threatened to harm her sister because she was considering ending their relationship and reuniting with her husband. Bennie Clay told The Tennessean newspaper last week that he has forgiven Black and intends to witness the execution of the man who killed his family. "God has a plan for everything," Clay said. "He had a plan when he took my girls. He needed them more than I did, I guess." Amid decades of appeals, Black faced three execution dates, but the procedures were delayed because of the Covid-19 pandemic and, more recently, a pause in Tennessee's executions due to issues in testing its lethal injection drugs. Tennessee resumed executions in May under a new lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital, a sedative. In testimony last month in Davidson County Chancery Court, medical experts for the state and Black argued over whether his ICD, which was installed last year, would, in fact, cause prolonged pain. "Mr. Black will not be feeling the shocks as he will be in a coma" brought on by the lethal injection process, testified Dr. Litsa Lambrakos, a cardiac electrophysiologist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. But Dr. Gail Van Norman, an anesthesiology professor at the University of Washington who specializes in heart surgery, suggested otherwise. She testified that using a potent amount of pentobarbital, which can cause death from respiratory failure, could unnecessarily trigger Black's defibrillator. "ICDs sometimes deliver shocks when they're not needed," she said. "This is devastating to patients." The potential disabling of Black's defibrillator had brought up larger questions about whether a medical professional could even be found who would be willing to assist the Tennessee Department of Correction. Major medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Board of Anesthesiology, have adopted ethical codes that generally promote the health and welfare of patients and do not explicitly condone their members' participating in executions. Advocates for Black say his case, given his unique position surrounding his defibrillator, as well as his documented mental impairments, warrants the governor's granting clemency. Black's lawyers say he uses a wheelchair and suffers from several ailments besides congestive heart failure, including dementia, kidney disease and prostate cancer. "His body is failing, and his mind is deteriorating," Henry wrote to Lee in a clemency request last month. "His execution would not serve justice — it would mark an irreversible act of cruelty against a profoundly physically and mentally impaired man who poses no threat to anyone and would leave his entire family, who cherish him, devastated."
Chicago Tribune
3 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Review: City Lit offers a challenging and poignant production of ‘Jesus Hopped the ‘A' Train'
Early on in 'Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train,' a sadistic corrections officer in Rikers Island prison compares himself to a cowboy in charge of cattle earmarked for the slaughterhouse. His grim comment sums up the central metaphor of this 2000 drama by Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Adly Guirgis, which examines the dehumanization inherent in our criminal justice system, particularly for Latino and Black men. As directed by Esteban Andres Cruz at City Lit Theater, the play's livestock imagery runs deep, from the piteous to the disgusting to the macabre. But there are more layers to Guirgis' play than this effective, if sometimes on-the-nose, symbolism. The script also probes the meaning of justice, the limits of the law in morally gray situations and the role of religious faith in an institution not conducive to redemption. With City Lit's production drawing clear parallels to today's headlines, especially through projections designed by Andres Fiz, this 25-year-old play feels disturbingly relevant. Recent University of Michigan graduate and Chicago native Lenin Izquierdo stars as Angel Cruz, a 30-year-old Puerto Rican man charged with the murder of Reverend Kim, the wealthy leader of a cult-like religious movement who claims to be the son of God. Desperate after his unsuccessful attempts to extricate his best friend from the church's influence, Angel resorts to shooting Kim in what he claims was intended as a non-lethal attack. When Kim later dies in a follow-up surgery, Angel's charges are escalated, and he faces a potential life sentence. Mary Jane Hanrahan (Maria Stephens), a plucky Irish Italian New Yorker, is Angel's public defender, motivated by a genuine belief in her client's cause and a competitive drive to win a difficult case. In a role reminiscent of Alfieri, the lawyer in Arthur Miller's 'A View from the Bridge,' Mary Jane narrates most of the play's legal procedures, as well as several traumatic events that occur during Angel's incarceration. Filtering key offstage developments through a secondhand narrator has mixed results; this dramatic choice adds some distance between audience and protagonist, but it also avoids the pitfalls of staging overt violence and keeps Angel's scenes focused on a more internal character arc. When Angel isn't consulting with Mary Jane, he spends his daily hour-long breaks from solitary confinement in conversation with Lucius Jenkins (Bradford Stevens), a Black man on death row for murdering eight people. Under the menacing surveillance of Officer Valdez (Manny Tamayo), the upbeat and chatty Lucius, who has converted to Christianity in prison, tries to comfort the shattered younger man and persistently proselytizes about his faith. In their interactions, the show really hits its stride in terms of dialogue and pacing, with sharp banter punctuating serious discussions of existential questions. Without attempting to exonerate Lucius, who shares some gruesome details about his crimes, the play encourages audience members to look beyond the orange jumpsuit and consider the complicated man and the circumstances that led to his horrific actions. This nuanced perspective is amplified by two scenes featuring another corrections officer, Charlie D'Amico (Michael Dailey), who grows close to Lucius during their time together in Rikers. The proverbial good cop to Valdez's bad cop, D'Amico narrates one of Lucius' most significant offstage moments, similarly to Mary Jane's monologues about Angel. In both cases, we hear about the pain of men of color through the voices of their white allies, a structural decision perhaps intended to protect actors and audience members from unnecessary trauma. Regardless of how the script reaches their characters' respective crises, Izquierdo and Stevens both give moving performances as Angel and Lucius try to connect over the physical bonds and the spiritual differences that separate them. Angel's tenderness and vulnerability also come through in his conversations with Mary Jane, especially when he tells the childhood story that inspires the play's name, and in his solitary moments, when he stumbles through fragments of the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary. 'Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train' occasionally loses steam in its extensive ethical debates, but when the play focuses on the humanity of its characters, City Lit's production is both challenging and poignant. Despite the distraction of a noisy fog machine, the livestock motif comes full circle in the end, when Tianxuan Chen's seemingly simple set, draped in a piecemeal collection of off-white canvases, gives way to a powerful final 'Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train' (3 stars) When: Through Sept. 7 Where: City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes Tickets: $15-$38 at 773-293-3682 and
New York Times
4 hours ago
- New York Times
Tennessee Inmate to Be Executed Despite Ethical Health Concerns
Tennessee is scheduled on Tuesday morning to execute a prisoner who has a heart implant, even as the case has raised ethical concerns that lethal injection without turning off the implant may result in a torturous death. Lawyers for the prisoner, Byron Black, who was convicted in 1989 of killing his onetime girlfriend and her two young daughters, had already argued that Mr. Black's intellectual disability should exempt him from the death penalty. But the fact that his heart implant, which functions as both a pacemaker and a defibrillator, will continue to operate during his execution has added another ethical quandary. Mr. Black's lawyers and some medical experts have warned that the device may shock him repeatedly as the lethal drug is injected. 'That's purposes at odds,' said Arthur Caplan, a top bioethicist at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. 'They're trying to make this guy die, and you have technology attached that's trying to keep him alive.' Given that Mr. Black is intellectually disabled and has dementia, Dr. Caplan added, Mr. Black may not understand what is going on beyond the searing pain of repeated shocks. Mr. Black, 69, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 10 a.m. on Tuesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
