A former US paramedic who injected Elijah McClain with ketamine has avoided prison and been sentenced to probation after his homicide conviction in the Black man's death.
Mr McClain's death helped fuel the 2020 racial injustice protests.
Jeremy Cooper had faced up to three years in prison after being found guilty in a jury trial last year of criminally negligent homicide.
He administered a dose of the sedative ketamine to Mr McClain, 23, who had been forcibly restrained after police stopped him as he was walking home in Denver, Colorado, in 2019.
Officers later referenced a suspicious person report, but Mr McClain was not armed or accused of breaking any laws.
Medical experts said by the time he received the sedative, Mr McClain already was in a weakened state from forcible restraint that rendered him temporarily unconscious.
He went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital and died three days later.
Mr Cooper's attorneys did not immediately respond to telephone messages and emails seeking comment on the sentencing.
Series of trials over
The sentencing caps a series of three trials that stretched over seven months and resulted in the convictions of a police officer and two paramedics.
Criminal charges against paramedics and emergency medical technicians involved in police custody cases are rare.
Experts say the convictions would have been unheard of before 2020, when George Floyd's murder sparked a nationwide reckoning over racist policing and deaths in police custody.
Mr McClain's mother, Sheneen McClain, said justice has not yet been served. She said the two acquitted police officers, as well as other firefighters and police on the scene, were complicit in her son's killing and that they escaped justice.
"I'm waiting on heaven to hand down everybody's judgement. Because I know heaven ain't gonna miss the mark," she told The Associated Press.
At least 94 people died after they were given sedatives and restrained by police from 2012 through 2021, according to findings by the AP in collaboration with Frontline (PBS) and the Howard Centres for Investigative Journalism.
Mr McClain's name became a rallying cry in protests over racial injustice in policing that swept the US in 2020.
"Without the reckoning over criminal justice and how people of colour suffer at much higher rates from police use of force and violence, it's very unlikely that anything would have come of this, that there would have been any charges, let alone convictions," said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and expert on racial profiling.
Mr Harris added that the two officers' acquittals following weeks-long trials were unsurprising, since juries are often reluctant to second guess the actions of police and other first responders.
"It's still very hard to convict," he said.
The judge who presided over the hearing Friday sentenced ex-paramedic Peter Cichuniec in March to five years in prison for criminally negligent homicide and second-degree assault, the most serious of the charges faced by any of the responders. It was the shortest sentence allowed under the law.
Previously, Judge Mark Warner sentenced officer Randy Roedema to 14 months in jail for criminally negligent homicide and misdemeanour assault.
Second autopsy revealed ketamine link
Prosecutors initially declined to pursue charges related to Mr McClain's death when an autopsy did not determine how he died.
Democratic Governor Jared Polis ordered the investigation reopened following the 2020 protests against police brutality.
The second autopsy said Mr McClain died because he was injected with ketamine after being forcibly restrained.
To Sheneen McClain, it doesn't make sense that officer Nathan Woodyard, who stopped her son and put him in a neck hold, was acquitted, while officer Roedema received a lighter sentence than the paramedic Cichuniec.
She thinks the paramedics' role was to cover up what the police had done to her son.
Since the killings of Mr Floyd, Mr McClain and others put a spotlight on police custody deaths, many departments, paramedic units and those that train them have re-examined how they treat suspects.
The Colorado health department has told paramedics not to give ketamine to people suspected of having excited delirium, which had been described in a since-withdrawn emergency physicians' report as manifesting symptoms including increased strength.
A doctors' group has called it an unscientific definition rooted in racism.
The protests over Mr McClain and Mr Floyd ushered in a wave of state legislation to curb the use of neck holds known as carotid restraints, which cut off circulation, and chokeholds, which cut off breathing.
At least 27 states including Colorado have passed some limit on the practices. Only two had bans in place before Mr Floyd was killed.
AP
