Folks around Grand Rapids have had a few weeks to come to terms with the recent outcome in the trial of former Grand Rapids Police Department officer, Christopher Schurr. Schurr was charged with second-degree murder over the shooting and killing of Patrick Lyoya during a traffic stop in April 2022.
After years of court appeals, in May Schurr faced a jury of 12 men and women to defend his case. Ultimately though, the jurors in his criminal trial failed to reach a unanimous verdict, ending in a mistrial with the majority in support of acquitting Schurr.
The case was unusual in that police rarely face criminal charges — or a conviction — when their use of force ends in death.
“In one sense, the law treats police officers not terribly dissimilar from ordinary people when it comes to self-defense, but what is very different is police training,” said Ekow Yankah, a University of Michigan law and philosophy professor.
Yankah’s work focuses on examining how political and criminal theories are used in the justification of punishment.
“Police officers are trained to see everything as a potential threat,” he said. “In fact, the police moniker is ‘better tried by 12 than carried by six' – better tried by a jury than to put yourself in fatal danger.”
This played out in court during the Schurr trial. When Schurr took the stand he told jurors how exhausted he was after chasing Lyoya and struggling over his taser. He also said that he attempted to use commands, knee strikes and even called for backup before Lyoya took hold of Schurr’s taser. In the seconds before Schurr made the decision to shoot Lyoya, Lyoya had in his hands the discharged taser.
“I was reaching over top of him in an attempt to shut it off in the hope he wouldn’t be able to use it on me," Schurr told the courtroom.
Making Schurr’s fear come alive to the jury, Yankah argues, is what ended in preventing a guilty verdict in the case. One one hand, he says he understands the worry police officers have when dealing with members of the public given the accessibility people have to firearms. About four-in-ten U.S. adults say they live in a household with a gun, including 32% who say they personally own one, according to a Center survey conducted in June 2023.
“But it is a worry that what we've inculcated in our police force is the kind of standing assumption that everybody in front of you is a heartbeat away from trying to kill you,” Yankah said. “And when that's how we train all our police all the time, it's not surprising that what looks to the world like an ordinary scuffle suddenly turns into a tragic shooting.”
After Lyoya’s death in April of 2022, Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker said he believed Schurr’s actions warranted a second-degree murder charge rather than a lesser offense like manslaughter.
“I wouldn’t charge it if I didn’t think I could prove it,” Becker told news media at the time.
Following these charges, Schurr was put on administrative leave and eventually fired from his job at the Grand Rapids Police Department. At the time city officials cited the ongoing criminal matter and the potential for civil litigation.
Yankah said it was Becker's decision to charge Schurr with second-degree murder that made it difficult for the jury to reach a consensus. That's because the jury had to determine, based on the arguments presented by both sides, whether Schurr’s actions deviated so significantly from his training and department policies that they ended up with him shooting and killing Lyoya.
“What he (Becker) did was make this case both more serious but tougher for himself,” Yanked added.
Since the hung jury decision, Becker has announced that he has no plans to retry Schurr. He has said he doesn’t believe another jury would reach a different outcome. This decision has drawn criticism from the Lyoya family and their supporters, who point out that the jury included only one Black person, who identified herself as biracial.
“I’m not presuming that a Black jury would have reasoned totally differently, there’s no easy line between your skin color and how you would have seen the case,” argued Yankah. “We want our juries to look like the communities in which they are embedded … even when we don’t think it’ll make a difference in the actual outcome.”
In Kent County, residents who identify as Black make up more than 10% of the county's population, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census.
Yankah said it’s unlikely that Schurr could face another criminal trial over the killing of Lyoya through any other legal avenue. For now, the Lyoya family has vowed to continue fighting for justice for their son as the civil trial against Schurr moves forward.
