No Charges Filed Over Death of Adama Traoré in France

A high-profile investigation into the dying 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 response to attorneys for each events.

Costs 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 dying 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 had 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’d enchantment the investigating magistrates’ choice to shut the case with out costs. In a statement, 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 incorporates contradictions, inconsistencies and severe violations of the legislation, is a shame to the judiciary,” Mr. Bouzrou mentioned.

Whereas the capturing of Mr. Merzouk was caught on a video that was shared extensively, rapidly creating outrage and prompting severe costs in opposition to the officer concerned, the circumstances of Mr. Traoré’s dying 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 condominium.

Three law enforcement officials 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 studies have pointed to coronary heart failure or asphyxiation as the reason for the dying. 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 supplied higher help to him when he handed out.

However attorneys for the officers within the case, who haven’t been publicly recognized, keep that they used “skilled and proportionate gestures” to subdue Mr. Traoré as he was resisting arrest and have mentioned the dearth of costs is “logical.”

“There was by no means any violence dedicated in the course of the legit arrest of Adama Traoré,” Rodolphe Bosselut, one of many attorneys for the officers concerned, mentioned in a press release.

Regardless of the dearth of readability round Mr. Traoré’s dying, his case and his household’s activism made him an emblem of deeply seated anger and mistrust 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 dying this summer season, prompting the French authorities to swiftly deploy a lot of law enforcement officials across the nation. The present of power ended the rioting inside per week, however it led to new allegations of police brutality.

In some of the outstanding instances, 4 law enforcement officials in Marseille had 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.