A high-profile investigation into the demise of Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old Black Frenchman who died in police custody in 2016, was formally closed on Friday with none costs in opposition to the three officers concerned, in accordance with legal professionals for each events.
Fees had by no means been filed in opposition to the officers over the course of a contentious multiyear investigation that concerned a number of, contradictory medical opinions. The closing of the case was extensively anticipated.
However Mr. Adama’s demise stays a rallying cry for these protesting discriminatory police violence in France, particularly because the nation grapples with the aftermath of per week of rioting in June. These protests have been set off by the lethal police capturing of Nahel Merzouk, a French teenager of North African descent.
Yassine Bouzrou, a lawyer for Mr. Adama’s household, mentioned they might attraction the investigating magistrates’ resolution to shut the case with out costs. In a assertion, he accused the magistrates of being biased in favor of the officers, arguing that that they had dismissed the case over “uncertainties” that ought to have been debated throughout a public trial.
“This order to dismiss the case, which accommodates contradictions, inconsistencies and severe violations of the regulation, is a shame to the judiciary,” Mr. Bouzrou mentioned.
Whereas the capturing of Mr. Merzouk was caught on a video that was shared extensively, shortly creating outrage and prompting severe costs in opposition to the officer concerned, the circumstances of Mr. Traoré’s demise are nonetheless hotly disputed.
Mr. Traoré died within the courtyard of a police station on a scorching summer season day in July 2016 after his arrest by gendarmes in Beaumont-sur-Oise, a city about 16 miles north of Paris.
The gendarmes, armed officers who police France’s smaller cities and rural areas, tried to verify Mr. Traoré’s identification as a part of an investigation into his brother, however Mr. Traoré fled and hid in a close-by house.
Three cops tracked Mr. Traoré down and pinned him to the bottom to arrest him. Afterward, Mr. Traoré reportedly mentioned that he couldn’t breathe after which handed out throughout his switch to the police station in Persan, a close-by city, the place he was pronounced lifeless two hours later.
Conflicting autopsies and skilled experiences have pointed to coronary heart failure or asphyxiation as the reason for the demise. Mr. Traoré’s household insists that he wouldn’t have died if the officers had not pinned him to the bottom and if that they had offered higher help to him when he handed out.
However legal professionals for the officers within the case, who haven’t been publicly recognized, preserve that they used “skilled and proportionate gestures” to subdue Mr. Traoré as he was resisting arrest and have mentioned the shortage of costs is “logical.”
“There was by no means any violence dedicated through the authentic arrest of Adama Traoré,” Rodolphe Bosselut, one of many legal professionals for the officers concerned, mentioned in an announcement.
Regardless of the shortage of readability round Mr. Traoré’s demise, his case and his household’s activism made him a logo of deeply seated anger and distrust towards the police in France’s poorer, minority-dominated city enclaves.
That anger exploded in days of chaotic rioting, arson and looting after Mr. Merzouk’s demise this summer season, prompting the French authorities to swiftly deploy numerous cops across the nation. The present of power ended the rioting inside per week, nevertheless it led to new allegations of police brutality.
In one of the distinguished instances, 4 cops in Marseille have been charged with assault over accusations that they severely injured a 22-year-old man, a part of whose cranium needed to be eliminated.
One of many officers, who was suspected of firing a rubber bullet on the man, was then detained, infuriating police unions across the nation, and main a few of them to stage walkouts. On Friday, the officer was freed however barred from working for the police whereas the investigation continues.
