The Huffington Post | By Kate Abbey-Lambertz Email Posted: 01/28/2015 6:00 pm EST
The Detroit police officer who fatally shot a sleeping 7-year-old girl will not be retried, officials said Wednesday.
Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said in a statement that her office was moving to dismiss the case against Officer Joseph Weekley. He was originally charged with involuntary manslaughter and careless discharge of a firearm causing death, a misdemeanor, after Aiyana Stanley-Jones was killed in 2010 during a botched police raid at her home.
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| Charles Jones, the father of 7-year-old Aiyana Jones, who was killed early Sunday in Detroit, holds a photo of Aiyana in attorney Geoffrey Fieger's office in Southfield, Mich., Tuesday, May 18, 2010. Fieger, the lawyer for the family of the slain 7-year-old Detroit girl has filed two lawsuits related to a weekend raid that led to her death. |
Weekley's first trial in 2013 ended in a mistrial. In a second trial last year, Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Cynthia Gray Hathaway dismissed the manslaughter charge after a motion by the defense. The jury again deadlocked while deliberating whether to convict Weekley of the lesser charge, causing a second mistrial."Today we personally informed the family of Aiyana Stanley–Jones that we have made a decision that we would not be going to trial for a third time in the Joseph Weekley case," Worthy said, calling Hathaway's decision to dismiss the manslaughter charge "unfortunate."
Shortly after midnight on May 16, 2010, members of the Detroit Police Department's Special Response Team initiated a raid on the Stanley-Jones home in search of a murder suspect. Weekley was first through the door and allegedly had difficulty seeing when another officer threw a a flash-bang grenade. Weekley fired his gun, killing Aiyana, who had been asleep on the couch with her grandmother. more
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