U.S. Attorney for Atlanta John A. Horn on Thursday said he will not pursue charges against the former Union City police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager twice in the back as he lay on the ground in 2011.
The decision by Horn effectively ends the criminal case against Luther Lewis. Two Fulton County grand juries have chosen not to indict Lewis in the shooting death of Ariston Waiters.
“I’m numb right now,” said Freda Waiters, Ariston’s mother, who has continued to pursue justice in what she calls the murder of her son by police.
The case gained new attention after a 2015 investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Channel 2 Action News raised new questions about the case and revealed two prior incidents where fellow officers said Lewis lied.
Lewis has maintained he shot Waiters in self-defense after the 19-year-old grabbed his gun. But the news organizations’ investigation uncovered information by a supervising lieutenant at the scene of the shooting who contradicted the officer’s justification for pulling his trigger. His testimony was not provided to the original grand jury in 2012.
Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard reopened the case after the AJC/Channel 2 reported the new evidence. After a second grand jury chose not to indict Lewis in August 2015, Horn's office met with Freda Waiters and opened its own inquiry.
Horn, the top federal prosecutor for Georgia’s Northern District, met with Waiters and civil rights activists Joe Beasley and Marcus Coleman for about a half hour Thursday morning to inform them of his decision. Horn’s office issued a statement that said the legal standard could not be met to prove a federal civil rights crime had been committed.
“Prosecutors must establish beyond a reasonable doubt not only that an officer’s use of force was excessive, but also that the officer did so willfully and intentionally, knowing that he was violating a constitutional right,” Horn said in a statement. “The review found insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer acted with the requisite criminal intent.”
Officers are rarely prosecuted in police shooting cases. Waiters was one of the 184 Georgians shot and killed by the police over a six-year-period from 2010 through 2015, according to the AJC/Channel 2 Action News investigation. None during that period were prosecuted in state or federal courts. Two officers were indicted last year in fatal shootings.
About one in six cases involved unarmed people killed by police. In Waiters’ case and 17 others the person was shot solely in the back of their torso, head, neck or buttocks. Blacks were twice as likely to be shot and killed by police as whites, based on population.
‘This is not justice’
Freda Waiters, who has been pursuing criminal charges against Lewis for more than five years, said “anything could happen” but acknowledged she may be out of options.
“This is not justice,” she said. “It’s not about justice and being fair. This is the system. This is the way the system works.”
The Waiters case helped highlight a unique Georgia law that allowed police officers to address grand jurors with a closing statement that could not be questioned or cross-examined. In both instances where the case was brought before a Fulton grand jury, Lewis gave lengthy, emotional statements to close out the proceedings.
DA Howard later told the AJC and Channel 2 that he believed those statements helped sway grand jurors. The law has since changed to restrict some of the special privileges Georgia police received before grand juries, including that officers must now face cross-examination if they address grand juries in shooting cases.
Lewis, who left the Union City Department in June 2014, tried to get a job with the Savannah Airport Commission police in July 2015. However, he was found to have lied on a job application and was fired. The state's police oversight agency, the Police Officer Standards and Training Council, revoked his certification last year.
Lewis has refused repeated interview requests since attention on the case resurfaced in 2015. Efforts to reach him on Thursday were unsuccessful.
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