A police officer who brutalized a 22-year-old Black man with an expandable baton during an arrest seven years ago was convicted by a French court on Friday of “intentional violence” in one of the country’s highest-profile cases of police abuse.
The young man, Théo Luhaka, sustained a four-inch tear to his rectum after the police subdued him during an identity check while he was cutting through a known drug-dealing zone in his housing project in a suburb northeast of Paris.
Two other officers who assisted in the arrest were also found guilty at the court in Bobigny, a suburb northeast of Paris, in a decision that was, however, unlikely to fully satisfy either police unions or anti-police brutality activists.
The officer who wielded the baton was sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence, meaning he will serve time only if he commits a new crime within a given time frame and a court then orders the full sentence to be served. The two other officers were sentenced to three-month suspended sentences. The sentences were less than what prosecutors had requested.
They had all pleaded not guilty, stating that Mr. Luhaka had been violently resisting arrest and they were acting in self-defense, doing their jobs in hostile terrain and under stressful conditions and that the baton thrust had been aimed at the upper thigh and was a technique learned at the police academy.
The verdict, delivered rapidly after over nine hours of deliberation, capped a trial that came at a time when the issue of race in France, and the policing of Black and Arab men in the country’s impoverished suburbs, remains particularly sensitive.
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