The former Sheriff’s Sheriff’s Sheriff’s Deputy of San Diego, Aaron Richard Russell, killed an unarmed man from behind in May 2020 outside the city center central prison, to the shock of other agents of the nearby law application, simply because the man fled, a prosecutor told a federal jury on Tuesday.
“No other officer at the scene thought that Nicholas Bils was a threat,” said assistant prosecutor in the United States, Seth Askins, at the jury while the trial began with declarations of opening to the Federal Court of the city center of San Diego. Askins said that no other officer even took out their weapons, and even less in bils. “Each of them knows that you cannot shoot an unarmed man in the back just to run away.”
The government alleges that Russell violated Bils’ civil rights when he killed him fatally, but defense lawyer Richard Pinckard told the jurors that the version of Askins events was too narrow. Pinckard said that the jury should consider all the circumstances of the “tense situation”, the total context and each of the officers’ perspectives.
Pinckard hinted at the jury that the other officers were distracted or frightened, but Russell was courageous enough to act.
Russell, who was 23 years old at the time of the shooting, is accused of a head of deprivation of Bils of his rights under the color of the law and a chief of use and discharge of a firearm compared to a crime of violence. If he is found guilty, the former deputy risks a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. He resigned from the sheriff’s office only a few days after the shooting.
Russell has already been charged by the County Prosecutors of the Superior Court of San Diego of second degree murder, becoming the first officer in charge of the application of the laws on the San Diego region to face an accusation of murder in the deadly death of a suspect. He was also the first state officer to face an accusation of murder under stricter standards of force which entered into force a few months before the shooting.
He finally pleaded guilty to a lesser accusation of voluntary homicide in the state affair, admitting in his adviser agreement that he “unreasonably believed that me or someone else was in imminent danger to be killed or to undergo a great bodily injury”, according to the office of the district prosecutor. “In fact, but I was unreasonably believed that the immediate use of the murderous force was necessary to defend itself against the danger,” he admitted to the advocacy agreement.
He was sentenced in February 2022 to one year in prison, although he ended up spending about five months in detention. He was also sentenced to three years of probation.
A few months later, the county agreed to pay $ 8.1 million to settle federal legal action submitted by the Bils family. Last May, more than four years after the shooting, a great federal jury charged Russell for the alleged violations of civil rights for which he is now tried.
The fatal shooting occurred on May 1, 2020, just over a month in the COVVI-19 pandemic, after two Californian guards of California state parks stopped bils in the Historic Park of the State of San Diego, where he had gone to play with his dog despite the fact that the park was closed to the public due to covid restrictions. Park Rangers said Bils, who used a golf putter to hit the balls to his dog, had briefly kept the club threatening while fleeing the Rangers.
The Rangers led bils to the central city prison in two vehicles, according to court documents and the declaration of opening of the Askins. When they reached the installation, Bils slipped a hand into its handcuffs and reached a slightly open rear window to allow the air flow because of the pandemic, said Askins. He opened his door with the outdoor handle, and as a second ranger in a van tried to go out, Bils pushed the door of the closed truck and sprinted north on front street. He was not armed.
Russell, who was walking to work in prison alongside another deputy, saw bils escaping from the opposite sidewalk car, according to legal documents and evidence in the case. He entered the street and, without warning of the bils to stop, fired five shots on him. At least four of the gunshots hit bils, including one who pierced his back on him.
“He has never even crossed the spirits (the other officers) to shoot Mr. Bils,” Askins told jurors. “It was not even a careful call.”
He said Russell graduated from the San Diego Régional Training Academy barely a year before the shooting and had received in -depth training at the moment when the officers can use a deadly force.
The prosecutor also began painting a table of Russell as a pending disaster, telling the jury that he had been reprimanded and almost expelled from the Regional Academy of the Application of Laws for having unloaded his weapon on the shooting field.
“In a handwritten report on the incident, the defendant explained that during a shooting exercise, he was too fast to put my finger on the trigger in anticipation to try to shoot as quickly as possible, ” wrote the prosecutors in a test memory.
Russell does not dispute having shot and killed bils. “What is in dispute … it is whether the use of the deadly force was objectively reasonable in all of the circumstances,” wrote his lawyer in a memory of the trial.
Russell also challenges whether the government can prove that it was acting under the color of the law, in part because it was on leave and had not yet timed to work in prison when it fired on bils. Part of this argument is also based on the inexperience of Russell. He graduated from the Academy in April 2019 and was still in the midst of his probationary period of 18 months as a deputy. And he had worked only in the courts and prison, never on the patrol.
“He had never worked in the field as a deputy responsible for the application of laws, and he had not even started his training program on the ground,” wrote his lawyer in a memory of the trial. “He had no real experience as a deputy responsible for the application of laws when he reacted to the actions of Mr. Bils.”
Pinckard also wrote in the memory of the trial that Bils “seized a brilliant object”, referring to the handcuffs which were still attached to a wrist. “Although with hindsight, Mr. Bils was finally determined to have been unarmed throughout the incident … He was later revealed that after having slipped the handcuffs from his left wrist, he picked up the loose cuff with his right hand and grabbed it with the shiny metal around his fist,” wrote Pinkard. “Mr. Bils’ actions immediately preceded his death and all of the circumstances presenting a tense, uncertain and quickly evolving situation, which would objectively make a peaceful agent formed in California to have used a murderous force.”
The Sheriff Kelly Martinez, who was at the time in a management position in the department, was listed by prosecutors and the defense as a potential witness to the trial, which is chaired by the American district judge Todd Robinson. The government should take about a week to go to the jury.
California Daily Newspapers
