Fatal beating of Tyre Nichols shown over and over at police trial

Before each screening, court staff dimmed the lights and jurors looked to a projection screen on the wall on the opposite side of the courtroom. When she was in attendance, Tyre Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, stood from her seat in the gallery and exited, unwilling and unable to watch. Below the screen, defendants Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley and Justin Smith sat with their backs to the wall, facing the jury as their actions played out above them.

The officers are charged with using excessive force, failure to intervene and witness tampering. Closing arguments began Wednesday, and jury deliberations were expected to begin by Thursday. The officers also face second-degree murder charges in state court.

John Keith Perry Jr., an attorney for Bean, played a portion of the video in slow motion more than five times the other day, emphasizing to jurors that several of Bean’s punches landed on Nichols’s hands, not his face.

During each replay, Nichols’s repeated screams for Wells — “Mama!” — were elongated into a slow, piercing wail. A visibly distressed juror muffled his ears with his hands.

The arguments accompanying each screening of the video have been central to the defense strategy. Perry argued that Emmitt Martin III, one of two officers who pleaded guilty ahead of the trial, was responsible for the killing blows — not the defendants.

Defense attorneys also used the footage to make the case that officers feared Nichols could strike them with the handcuffs that were attached to one of his wrists. They argued Haley kicked Nichols in the shoulder and neck area, not precisely in the head.

The strategy was predictable, according to jury trial consultants and jury psychology researchers. It could help the defendants poke holes in the government’s case and create their own narrative around the chief piece of evidence, hoping to convince at least one juror that some of the officers’ actions were justified, the experts said. And leaning on the video could desensitize some jurors to the violence, to a degree.

But repeatedly playing the video could have the opposite effect on jurors, keeping them focused on the collective brutality of the encounter.

“It’s a risky strategy,” said Carol B. Anderson, a retired clinical professor at the School of Law at Wake Forest University and the author of “Inside Jurors’ Minds: The Hierarchy of Juror Decision-Making.” “If lawyers make certain information more available to us, if we see it a lot, we get more comfortable with it. If it’s something awful, it tends to lose its shock value.”

Slowing down the video’s frame rate and showing bits of footage at a time could distort the jury’s subconscious interpretation of the entire event, said Ellen Leggett, a former professor of psychology at the University of Southern California and the founder of Leggett Jury Research, a trial consultancy.

“They are deliberately deconstructing the event down into small tidbits that they assume will deconstruct the impact emotionally,” Leggett said.

Defense attorneys must recognize their audience, experts said. Many Memphis residents in the jury pool were aware of the Nichols killing, and many potential jurors said during questioning that they had seen the video online or in news reports. Attorneys for the defense couldn’t ignore the video, so they embraced it, combing the footage for details at odds with the government’s interpretation.

“The video is a damning piece of evidence,” said Paul Neale, the CEO of DOAR, a New York-based trial consultancy that offers resources in jury selection and trial presentation, among other services. “I think by showing it over and over again, they’re getting the jury comfortable with it, then taking control of it, perhaps giving the jury the perception that they see it as the most critical piece of evidence in their favor.”

The officers’ lawyers are hoping to target at least one “defense-minded” juror who can be persuaded to find reasonable doubt in the government’s case, Leggett said. That juror could either swing their colleagues in the defense’s favor or refuse to bring guilty verdicts, resulting in a hung jury.

“With those nuanced, narrow issues they’re looking at, watching the video carefully is a way for them to counter allegations by the prosecution,” Leggett said. “They’re dancing on the head of a pin. But anyone who may be receptive on that jury, it gives them something to hang their hat on.”

Anderson, the retired Wake Forest Law professor, compared the officers’ defense strategy to the approach taken by lawyers for the Los Angeles Police Department officers who beat Rodney King in 1991. Attorneys in their state criminal trial embraced the video recording of King’s arrest to argue the officers used reasonable force given the threat they believed King posed at the time.

A key difference between the two cases, which occurred more than three decades apart: The officers who beat King were granted a change of venue from Los Angeles County to comparatively conservative Simi Valley, Calif. The trial there did not result in any convictions.

“With the King trial, they showed the video again and again and again until jurors got desensitized to it,” Anderson said. “But if somebody is having a visceral reaction on the Memphis jury, covering their ears, that should be a cue that people aren’t responding the way they want.”

Said Leggett: “You’re hoping — grasping — to get one juror, in spite of everybody else being upset.”