MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — A jury was selected Tuesday for the federal trial of three former Memphis police officers charged with federal civil rights violations in the January 2023 beating death of Tyre Nichols.
A pool of 200 candidates answered questionnaires ahead of jury selection to assess their ability to serve on the panel. Prospective jurors answered questions from U.S. District Judge Mark Norris about whether they could be fair and impartial in the face of heavy media coverage before the trial and whether watching video of the beating would be a problem for them if they are chosen.
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Former Memphis police officer Tadarrius Bean arrives at the federal courthouse for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Former Memphis police officer Justin Smith arrives at the federal courthouse for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Former Memphis police officer Tadarrius Bean, right, arrives at the federal courthouse with attorney John Keith Perry, right, for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Former Memphis police officer Demetrius Haley arrives at the federal courthouse for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
RowVaughn Wells, left, and Rodney Wells, parents of Tyre Nichols, arrive at the federal courthouse before the start of jury selection of the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, in Memphis. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
FILE - The image from video released on Jan. 27, 2023, by the City of Memphis, shows Tyre Nichols during a brutal attack by five Memphis police officers on Jan. 7, 2023, in Memphis, Tenn. (City of Memphis via AP, File)
FILE - This combo of images provided by the Memphis, Tenn., Police Department shows, top row from left, officers Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, and bottom row from left, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith. (Memphis Police Department via AP, File)
Former Memphis police officer Justin Smith, left, and attorney Martin Zummach, right, arrive at the federal courthouse for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Former Memphis police officer Demetrius Haley arrives at the federal courthouse for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Former Memphis police officer Tadarrius Bean arrives at the federal courthouse for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Jury selection continues in the trial of 3 ex-Memphis officers charged in Tyre Nichols' death
Jury selection continues in the trial of 3 ex-Memphis officers charged in Tyre Nichols' death
FILE - The screen at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans honors Tyre Nichols before an NBA basketball game between the New Orleans Pelicans and the Washington Wizards, Jan. 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton, File)
Prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed on the 12 jurors and four alternates after more than 12 hours of jury selection, which began Monday. Opening statements are expected Wednesday. The trial is expected to last three to four weeks.
Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley and Justin Smith have pleaded not guilty to charges that they deprived the 29-year-old Nichols of his rights through excessive force and failure to intervene, and obstructed justice through witness tampering. The beating was caught on police cameras, triggering protests and calls for police reform. Two others, Emmitt Martin III and Desmond Mills Jr., have already pleaded guilty to the federal charges and could testify against their former colleagues.
Nichols, who was Black, died in a hospital on Jan. 10, 2023, three days after he was kicked, punched and hit with a police baton following a traffic stop. Police video released that month showed the five officers, who also are Black, beating Nichols as he yelled for his mother about a block from his home. Video also showed the officers milling about and talking with each other as Nichols sat on the ground, struggling with his injuries.
The officers said Nichols was pulled over for reckless driving, but Memphis’ police chief has said there is no evidence to substantiate that claim.
An autopsy report showed Nichols died from blows to the head and that the manner of death was homicide. The report described brain injuries and cuts and bruises to the head and other areas.
Nichols worked for FedEx, and he enjoyed skateboarding and photography.
The three officers now facing trial, along with Martin and Mills, were fired for violating Memphis Police Department policies. They had been members of a crime suppression team called the Scorpion Unit, which was disbanded after Nichols’ death.
Shortly after their dismissal, the five were charged with second-degree murder in state court, where they pleaded not guilty. They were then indicted by a federal grand jury in September 2023.
Mills and Martin have each pleaded guilty in federal court and are expected to plead guilty to state charges as well. A trial date in state court has not been set.
On Monday, the judge read a list of potential witnesses that includes Martin and Mills, in addition to two other former officers. Preston Hemphill fired his stun gun at the traffic stop scene but didn’t follow Nichols to where other officers pummeled him. Hemphill was fired. Dewayne Smith was the supervising lieutenant who arrived on scene after the beating. He retired instead of being fired.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee on Tuesday told reporters that Nichols' death “never should have happened," but that “steps have been made to improve on the circumstances in the city of Memphis and in the Memphis Police Department.”
“That family will always be forever changed because of that loss,” the Republican said when asked directly about the ongoing trial. “And we talk a lot about redemption. And what we have to hope is that the redemption that comes with justice will be executed here in this case.”
Earlier this year, Lee and Republican lawmakers clashed with Nichols' mother and stepfather as the state repealed Memphis police reforms implemented after their son's death. One of the voided city ordinances had outlawed so-called pretextual traffic stops, such as for a broken taillight and other minor violations.
Associated Press reporters Jonathan Mattise and Kimberlee Kruesi contributed from Nashville, Tennessee.
Former Memphis police officer Tadarrius Bean arrives at the federal courthouse for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Former Memphis police officer Justin Smith arrives at the federal courthouse for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Former Memphis police officer Tadarrius Bean, right, arrives at the federal courthouse with attorney John Keith Perry, right, for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Former Memphis police officer Demetrius Haley arrives at the federal courthouse for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
RowVaughn Wells, left, and Rodney Wells, parents of Tyre Nichols, arrive at the federal courthouse before the start of jury selection of the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, in Memphis. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
FILE - The image from video released on Jan. 27, 2023, by the City of Memphis, shows Tyre Nichols during a brutal attack by five Memphis police officers on Jan. 7, 2023, in Memphis, Tenn. (City of Memphis via AP, File)
FILE - This combo of images provided by the Memphis, Tenn., Police Department shows, top row from left, officers Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, and bottom row from left, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith. (Memphis Police Department via AP, File)
Former Memphis police officer Justin Smith, left, and attorney Martin Zummach, right, arrive at the federal courthouse for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Former Memphis police officer Demetrius Haley arrives at the federal courthouse for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Former Memphis police officer Tadarrius Bean arrives at the federal courthouse for the second day of jury selection for the trial in the Tyre Nichols case Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Jury selection continues in the trial of 3 ex-Memphis officers charged in Tyre Nichols' death
Jury selection continues in the trial of 3 ex-Memphis officers charged in Tyre Nichols' death
FILE - The screen at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans honors Tyre Nichols before an NBA basketball game between the New Orleans Pelicans and the Washington Wizards, Jan. 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton, File)
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are both pushing Tuesday to energize key constituencies that their allies worry might be slipping away. The vice president is looking to reach Black men and the former president is focusing on women.
Harris will appear at a town hall-style event in Detroit hosted by the morning radio program “The Breakfast Club,” featuring Charlamagne Tha God. Trump, meanwhile, will tape a Fox News Channel town hall featuring an all-female audience moderated by host Harris Faulkner.
Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz unveiled his ticket’s plan to improve the lives of rural Americans. It’s yet another sign that in a razor-tight race, each side is trying to cut into the other’s margins while shoring up traditional areas of strength.
Elsewhere on Tuesday, Trump sat down for a discussion at the Economic Club of Chicago.
Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
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Former President Barack Obama plans to join Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz in Wisconsin next week for the kickoff for in-person early voting in the battleground state.
Walz, the governor of neighboring Minnesota, and Obama have scheduled a rally in Wisconsin’s liberal capital city of Madison on Oct. 22. That is the first day that Wisconsin voters can cast ballots in person at designated polling locations ahead of Election Day. Absentee ballots started being sent to voters in late September and, as of Monday, about 240,000 had been returned.
Wisconsin is a “blue wall” state, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, and is key to Vice President Kamala Harris’ victory strategy.
Obama is the only presidential candidate in the past six elections who has won Wisconsin by more than a percentage point.
On the day before the 2012 election, Obama held a rally in Madison that attracted about 18,000 people. Another Obama rally in October of that year drew about 30,000 people.
Donald Trump is once again claiming that there was a peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election, despite the fact that his supporters violently stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6 after he refused to accept his loss.
And he is claiming that there was “love and peace” in the crowd, even as those who descended on the Capitol smashed windows, rammed through doors and clashed violently with police, leaving more than 100 injured.
“It was a peaceful transition of power,” Trump said at a Chicago Economic Club event.
The friendly audience responded with boos when his interviewer tried to dispute him.
Trump also repeated several other falsehoods in his response.
He claimed that “not one of those people had a gun” and that “Nobody was killed,” except Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter who was shot and killed by police.
In fact, five people died in the riot and its immediate aftermath, including Brian Sicknick, a police officer. Four additional officers who responded to the riot killed themselves in the following weeks and months.
A slew of rioters were carrying weapons, including firearms, knives, brass knuckle gloves, a pitchfork, a hatchet, a sledgehammer and a bow. They also used makeshift weapons, including flagpoles, a table leg, hockey stick and crutch, to attack officers. One rioter has been charged with climbing scaffolding and firing a gun in the air during the melee.
Trump also claimed that “a lot of strange things happened” and that rioters were waved into the building.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger said in a memo that the allegation that “our officers helped the rioters and acted as ‘tour guides’” is “outrageous and false.” Manger said police were completely overwhelmed and outnumbered, and in many cases resorted to de-escalation tactics to try to persuade rioters to leave the building.
While there were cases where police retreated or stepped aside, there is no evidence that any rioter was “ushered” into the building.
Donald Trump won’t say whether he’s spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin since he left office.
But he says doing so would be good for the country.
“I don’t comment on that,” he said at an event before the Chicago Economic Club. “But I will tell you that if I did it’s a smart thing. If I’m friendly with people, if I can have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing and not a bad thing in terms of a country.”
Journalist Bob Woodward reported in his new book, “War,” that Trump has had as many as seven private phone calls with Putin since leaving office and secretly sent the Russian president COVID-19 test machines during the height of the pandemic.”
Trump spokesperson Steve Cheung called the reporting false. Trump told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl that Woodward is “a storyteller. A bad one. And he’s lost his marbles.”
Donald Trump is defending his support for high tariffs as an economic cure-all as he speaks before members of the Economic Club of Chicago.
“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff,’” Trump tells Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, who is interviewing him at the event. Micklethwait has repeatedly pressed Trump on warnings from economists that the costs of high tariffs will be passed along to American consumers, raising prices.
But Trump isn’t budging.
“It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong,” he says, to laughs.
The Economic Club of Chicago describes its membership as “a curated composition of business and civic leaders.”
Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday will unveil his ticket’s plans to improve the lives of rural voters, as Vice President Kamala Harris looks to cut into former President Donald Trump’s support.
The Harris-Walz plan includes a focus on improving rural health care, such as plans to recruit 10,000 new health care professionals in rural and tribal areas through scholarships, loan forgiveness and new grant programs, as well as economic and agricultural policy priorities. The plan was detailed to The Associated Press by a senior campaign official on the condition of anonymity ahead of its official release on Tuesday.
It marks a concerted effort by the Democratic campaign to make a dent in the historically Trump-leaning voting bloc in the closing three weeks before Election Day. Trump carried rural voters by a nearly two-to-one margin in 2020, according to AP VoteCast. In the closely contested race, both Democrats and Republicans are reaching out beyond their historic bases in hopes of winning over a sliver of voters that could ultimately prove decisive.
Walz is set to announce the plan during a stop in rural Lawrence County in western Pennsylvania, one of the marquee battlegrounds of the 2024 contest. He is also starring in a new radio ad for the campaign highlighting his roots in a small town of 400 people and his time coaching football, while attacking Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson has sued CNN over its recent report that he made explicit racial and sexual posts on a pornography website’s message board. He made the announcement Tuesday and calls the reporting reckless and defamatory.
The lawsuit comes less than four weeks after a report that led many of his fellow GOP elected officials and candidates to distance themselves from Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign. That includes GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
CNN declined to comment on the lawsuit. Robinson is also suing a man who alleges Robinson frequented a porn shop decades ago.
A Georgia judge has ruled county election officials must certify election results by the deadline set in law and cannot exclude any group of votes from certification even if they suspect error or fraud.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled that “no election superintendent (or member of a board of elections and registration) may refuse to certify or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance.” While they have the right to inspect the conduct of an election and to review related documents, he wrote, “any delay in receiving such information is not a basis for refusing to certify the election results or abstaining from doing so.”
Georgia law says county election superintendents, which are multimember boards in most counties, “shall” certify election results by 5 p.m. on the Monday after an election — or the Tuesday if Monday is a holiday as it is this year.
The ruling comes as early voting began Tuesday in Georgia.
Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County election board, had asked the judge to declare that her duties as an election board member were discretionary and that she’s entitled to “full access” to “election materials.”
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump reads a note that Justin Caporale brought onto the stage at a campaign town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center & Fairgrounds, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, in Oaks, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump waves to supporters at a campaign town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center & Fairgrounds, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, in Oaks, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
FILE - Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks along the southern border with Mexico, on Aug. 22, 2024, in Sierra Vista, Ariz. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris departs Erie International Airport, in Erie, Pa., Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, after a campaign rally. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally at Erie Insurance Arena, in Erie, Pa., Monday, Oct. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris talks with local staff before she departs Erie International Airport, in Erie, Pa., Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, after a campaign rally. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump greets supporters at a campaign town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center & Fairgrounds, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, in Oaks, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris claps on stage during a campaign rally at Erie Insurance Arena, in Erie, Pa., Monday, Oct. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
