Civil rights leaders and attorneys are demanding Texas authorities launch a video allegedly capturing a neighborhood cop slamming a Black man to the bottom resulting in him being in a paralyzed state.
The native NAACP sued the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Workplace on behalf of Christopher Shaw, a 41-year-old Black man who was partially immobilized by Beaumont police officer James Thomas Gillen — calling for the footage to be made public on Thursday, June 29.
Shaw was in Gillen’s custody on the Jefferson County Correctional Facility for public intoxication on June 12, 2021, when the alleged violence occurred.
Famend nationwide civil rights attorneys Ben Crump and Harry Daniels with legal professional Likelihood Lynch are additionally representing Shaw in a separate lawsuit in opposition to Gillen, Beaumont, and Corrhealth, LLC.
“The video is plain,” Crump stated in a press release. “It reveals Officer Gillen physique slamming a handcuffed Christopher Shaw onto a concrete ground, breaking his defenseless consumer’s neck and leaving him paralyzed. The reality, hid for over two years, is now uncovered, and we is not going to enable them to cover anymore.”
Shaw’s federal lawsuit filed in July 2022 alleges he was handcuffed and restrained by deputies on the Jefferson County jail when Gillen forcefully threw him onto the concrete ground, inflicting Shaw’s neck to fracture. Shaw’s attorneys alleged he posed no bodily menace to Gillen or any officers current, and suffered a life-altering damage as a result of assault.
The criticism claims Shaw was left mendacity on the ground, visibly paralyzed, pleading for help from the Corrhealth medical personnel on the jail and these pleas for assist have been disregarded, leaving Shaw mendacity in urine and feces.
A Jefferson County grand jury declined to indict Gillen for legal prices.
Regardless of repeated calls for from the media and the general public, the Beaumont Police Division and the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Workplace have refused to launch the video footage of the incident, his attorneys allege.
Shaw is going through prices of assault of a public official and misdemeanor public intoxication. Nonetheless, his authorized crew maintains that he by no means assaulted anybody.
“Their mistreatment of Christopher Shaw extends past the brutal assault that left him paralyzed from the chest down. They intention to unjustly incarcerate him for against the law that by no means occurred,” Daniels stated in a press release. “They need to conceal him away, similar to they’re hiding this video, in order that the general public doesn’t witness the extent of their hazard to all of us.”
