St. Louis Violence: Here's The Real Reason A Judge Acquitted A White Cop Charged With Murdering A Black Man

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Police in riot gear marched in lines shoulder-to-shoulder Friday after violence broke out over the acquittal of a white police officer charged with murder in the 2011 shooting death of a black man. Within minutes of the verdict, demonstrators in the hundreds were flowing into the streets of downtown St. Louis and gathering in scattered groups. Protesting was peaceful for a short time until some demonstrators began hurling rocks and bottles at police officers and damaging businesses and emergency vehicles. The violence continued as a group of about 1,000 protesters marched to Mayor Lyda Krewson's residence and smashed the house's windows, pelted it with paint and burned an American flag on its front lawn.

At least nine police officers were injured, including one who was in serious condition after being hit by a thrown brick and another who suffered a broken jaw. Police spokeswoman Schron Jackson said that as of early Saturday 32 people had been arrested. Police used chemicals on several occasions against groups that had grown especially violent, Acting Police Chief Lawrence O'Toole reported just after midnight Saturday.

"Orders to disperse were given numerous times," he said. "Tear gas was deployed after officers were assaulted with bricks and bottles. Officers did deploy pepper balls as a less-than-lethal option after agitators continued to assault officers with objects and destroy property.”

Barricades have been set up in anticipation of further protests and some downtown businesses have boarded their windows and closed for the time being Many schools in the city closed early Friday.

Nobody seems to know how much more protesting or violence to expect but city and state officials were clearly concerned Friday by the unmistakeable echoes of the 2014 uprising in Ferguson over a different police shooting.

Activists and most of St. Louis's black leaders have long framed the St. Louis shooting was yet another case of the violent and often deadly misconduct police routinely use against black people. The leaders have been warning for weeks that a not-guilty verdict would mean real trouble.

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens said the National Guard is ready to step in if needed. The governor thanked the protesters who remained peaceful, but he warned the others that their "violence will not be tolerated."

"Unfortunately, we did have some people who decided to engage in acts of violence," the governor said after meeting law enforcement officials in St. Louis. "Assaulting a law enforcement officer is not a peaceful protest. Breaking windows is not a peaceful protest. Destroying and vandalizing police cars is not free speech, and we are not going to tolerate it in the state of Missouri."

The officer who was acquitted Friday, Jason Stockley of the St. Louis police department, had faced the possibility of life in prison on charges of first degree murder and armed criminal action for shooting to death Anthony Lamar Smith after a high-speed chase across St. Louis streets. Prior to the chase, Stockley and his parter, Brian Bianchi, believed they had seen Smith complete a drug deal a short distance from the Buick he had parked outside a Church's Fried Chicken restaurant.

The officers intended to question him. Smith had noticed their marked police SUV speeding across the parking lot toward him, and he bolted for his car, hitting the driver's seat just after the SUV was parked directly on his bumper. With no easy way out, Smith quickly drove forward to the restaurant, then shifted to reverse, punched the gas, and slammed into the SUV as the officer were climbing out of it. With a series of quick herky-jerky forward and reverse turns, Smith managed to get the the car pointed toward the road just as he noticed both officers were within a couple feet of the car, Bianchi on the driver's side, Stockley on the other. Smith floored it. Bianchi managed to swing his service revolver toward Smith's head as the car sped away. He shattered the driver's side window and then immediately wasted no time warning his partner about the glimpse he got of Smith's right hand.

"Gun!" he yelled.

The officers jumped into their vehicle, Bianchi behind the wheel trying to catch up to the Buick, no easy challenge given the car was barreling at speeds that approached 90mph while barreling across city roads slippery from rain and congested as usual. All high-speed police chases create increased risks not only to the pursuers and the pursued but also every pedestrian, cyclist and motorist who happens to be in their path. The chase for Smith was already exceptionally dangerous when he suddenly increased the risk of serious injury and death even more substantially when he drove directly into oncoming traffic.

Smith was driving so erratically that Stockley decided that a ramming maneuver so dangerous that Missouri police departments essentially consider it as a form of deadly force that officers can used only when when lives are at stake and no other option is available to save them. The maneuver justified deadly force because the longer Smith was on the road the more likely he was to kill someone and ramming was the only practical means available to stop him quickly.

Seconds later, only three minutes after Smith fled the chicken restaurant, the police SUV rammed the rare of the Buick, redirecting the car as if Smith had made a hard right turn, sending the car crashing into a curb and to a halt so abrupt its airbags deployed.

The maneuver eliminated the risk the car had posed.

Anthony Lamar Smith, though, appeared to Stockley to be as defiant as ever and maybe even more dangerous. Stockley had arrived a the driver's side of the Buick almost immediately after it crashed. With the car's interior now covered by airbags, Stokley noticed that Snow was searching the seats below him by patting them by touch. Stockley ordered him to show his hands. Snow ignored him. The Stokely repeated the order at least three times. Snow kept right on searching as if he heard nothing.

Then, suddenly, the officer would later testify, Snow's expression changed completely and he stopped the tapping but kept his hands unseen. Believing that Snow had located his gun, Stokley's orders became more forceful. When Snow appeared to the officer to be raising a gun to shoot Stockley, Stockley fire his weapon first, hitting Snow five times, killing him.

Few details of Stockely's account have been called into question other than the only explanation that had any real potential to land him in prison: why he hilled Smith.Did he shoot in self-defense, with legitimate reason to believe his life was in danger, as he has maintained? Or did he shoot because he was so angered by the chase that he had decided even before Smith's car crashed that this guy was going to pay?

An investigation into the shooting had been essentially rendered inactive for years after state and federal prosecutors reviewed it and filed no criminal charges. Stockley left the police force soon after the shooting. Smith's family and some of the city's black leaders and activists continued to demand action against the officer but attention to the case has been steadily waning until last year, when Saint Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce charged the officer with first-degree murder and armed criminal action.

The severity of the murder charge was surprising not only in light of the circumstances involved in the shooting but also because of the exceptionally difficult burden of proof required for any first-degree murder conviction. Prosecutors in the case could win a conviction only by proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Stockley deliberated and planned to kill Smith, no easy task considering the only connection between the two began with the high-speed chase and ended with the shooting. Further, and perhaps even more difficult, prosecutors had to find a way to disprove Stockley's self-defense claim, somehow showing that the officer did not feel in danger when he was standing feet from a man who was resisting arrest and had likely just grabbed his gun.

Stockley asked for a bench trial, meaning his guilt or innocence would be determined not by a panel of jurors but by a single person, in this case Circuit Judge Timothy Wilson.

At the trial in August, prosecutors described Stockley as an out-of-control officer who shot Smith without provocation and then planted a .38-caliber revolver in the car to support a false claim of self-defense.

In a 30-page document explaining his decision to acquit Stockley, the judge said prosecutors had not met the legal requirements for a murder conviction. Because they also failed to disprove the officer's claim of self-defense, the judge ruled that Stockley could not consider lesser offenses such as manslaughter because the claim covered them all.

"This court, as the trier of fact, is simply not firmly convinced of defendant's guilt," Wilson wrote. "Agonizingly, this court has pored over the evidence again and again … This court, in conscience, cannot say that the state has proven every element of murder beyond a reasonable doubt or that the defendant did not act in self-defense."

He dismissed Stockley's comment about killing Smith as the product of adrenalin generated by chasing an armed drug suspect at high speeds through city streets, writing that people “say all kinds of things in the heat of the moment,” and that the meaning of Stockley's words were unclear in this case because they emerged without context from a garbled recording.

As for the claim that Stockley planted a gun in Smith's car, Wilson wrote that not only did prosecutors offer meaningful evidence to support the claim but that video from bystanders and patrol cars showed the claim to was false. For good measure, the judge added that based on his experience from nearly 30 years on the bench “that an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly.”

Aware of the interest in the case and the potential for violence, the judge's written explanation declared that he would not be swayed by "partisan interests, public clamor or fear of criticism."

In a written statement following the verdict, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, acknowledged the difficulty of winning police shooting cases but said prosecutors believe they "offered sufficient evidence that proved beyond a reasonable doubt" that Stockley intended to kill Smith. The case was filed before she took office, replacing Joyce, who retired.

Stockley, 36, could have been sentenced to up to life in prison without parole. He left the St. Louis police force in 2013 and moved to Houston.

The case was among several in recent years in which a white officer killed a black suspect. Officers were acquitted in recent police shooting trials in Minnesota, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. A case in Ohio twice ended with hung juries, and prosecutors have decided not to seek a third trial.

"It's a sad day in St. Louis, and it's a sad day to be an American," the Rev. Clinton Stancil, a protest leader, said of the acquittal.

Fears of unrest in St. Louis prompted several downtown businesses and some schools to close early.
The crowd of protesters included blacks, whites and other races. Some people carried guns, which state law allows.

Efforts at civil disobedience Friday had mixed results. When several demonstrators tried to rush onto Interstate 64, they were blocked on an entrance ramp by police cars and officers on bikes. When they tried to enter the city's convention center, the doors were locked.

Earlier in the day, protesters stood in front of a bus filled with officers in riot gear, blocking it from moving forward. When officers began pushing back the crowd, protesters resisted and police responded with pepper spray. Later, protesters surrounded a police vehicle and damaged it with rocks. Some in the crowd threw rocks and pieces of curbing at police who tried to secure the vehicle. That led to officers using pepper spray again.

As night came, hundreds of protesters moved to St. Louis' upscale Central West End section, where they marched and chanted as people looked on from restaurants and hospital windows lining busy Kingshighway. The group tried marching onto I-64 again, but police blocked their path.

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Associated Press Writer Summer Ballentine contributed to this report.
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By JIM SALTER, Associated Press