Over the past year, those who followed up on high-profile cases that saw Black Americans lose their lives at the hands of police found themselves waiting with anxiety to find out what kind of consequences the officers involved would face.
And indeed, the progress of these cases have been hard to predict as the officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor received no charges while Derek Chauvin was recently found guilty on all charges for his role in the death of George Floyd.
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But while these cases went on, there was another legal matter developing that was 15 years in the making. And the implications it has had for American justice were just as important.
In November of 2006, a police officer named Gregory Kwiatkowski responded to a dispute between a woman and her former boyfriend, Neal Mack, who she accused of stealing her Social Security check.
According to The New York Times , officer Cariol Horne responded to a call for assistance in this matter only to discover Kwiatkowski “in a rage” and punching a handcuffed Mack in the face repeatedly while other officers stood by.
Soon after, Kwiatkowski put Mack in a chokehold that Horne described as a “a bear hug headlock from behind.”
As The New York Times reported, Horne heard Mack say that he couldn’t breathe and forcibly broke Kwiatkowski’s hold before the two officers engaged in a fistfight.
An internal investigation then cleared Kwiatkowski of any wrongdoing while determining that Horne’s use of force against a fellow officer had not been justified in two hearings over the course of the two years that followed.
At that time, she was reassigned and subjected to departmental charges before ultimately being fired in May of 2008. Kwiatkowski would be promoted to lieutenant in the same year.
This firing came months before the 20-year mark on the force that would entitle Horne to a full pension.
Although she spent much of the 15 years after the incident fighting this decision, vindication seemed to evade her as The New York Times reported that Kwiatkowski would win a $65,000 judgment against her after suing for defamation.
According to CBS News , Mack didn’t fare any better when he sued Kwiatkowski and the four officers who stood by during the beating in 2012.
Over the course of Horne’s legal struggles, Mack maintained that she had saved his life.
As he told CBS, “He was choking me. I was handcuffed. Cariol Horne said, ‘You killing him, Greg,’ and she reached over and tried to grab his hand around my neck.”
And according to The New York Times , the Buffalo legislature started to see things that way in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.
Not only did the incident reinvigorate interest in her case but it also led the city’s Common Council to approve a duty-to-intervene law requiring officers to step in when one of their colleagues uses excessive force. It also allowed officers fired within the last 20 years for stopping excessive force to challenge their terminations.
They would call this “Cariol’s law.”
This meant that Horne was able to cite a law named after her to reverse a previous court decision that affirmed her termination.
And as The New York Times reported, Justice Dennis E. Ward granted her a full pension and back pay in his decision.
As for Kwiatkowski, CBS News reported that he would be sentenced to four months of federal imprisonment in 2018 over a 2009 incident in which he was found to use excessive force against four Black teenagers that included slamming their heads into a car.
In response to the decision that finally restored her pension, Horne said, “My vindication comes at a 15-year cost, but what has been gained could not be measured. I never wanted another police officer to go through what I had gone through for doing the right thing.”
h/t: The New York Times , CBS News
