The new district attorney for California’s Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area said Tuesday that a new Public Accountability Unit will re-investigate eight police shootings and custody deaths, including two killings of unarmed men by the same Oakland police officer.
The announcement by Pamela Price to the Bay Area News Group could open the door to the filing of criminal charges involving officers after the previous DA declined to charge them.
The review will include two 15-year-old shootings by Oakland Officer Hector Jimenez. In July 2008, Jimenez killed 27-year-old Mack “Jody” Woodfox, who was shot in the back while running away from a traffic stop.
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Seven months earlier, Jimenez and another officer shot and killed Andrew Moppin-Buckskin, 20, who also ran away after a traffic stop.
In both cases, Jimenez told investigators that he believed the suspects were reaching for guns in their waistbands.
Former District Attorney Nancy O’Malley reviewed both cases and found the officers involved couldn’t be charged with criminal wrongdoing.
Jiminez was fired in 2009 for violating Oakland police use-of-force policies but he was reinstated after an arbitrator found the shooting was lawful, said Michael Rains, the attorney whose firm represented Jimenez during the arbitration process.
Rains told the San Francisco Chronicle he was skeptical that the re-examination of the Woodfox case would find “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that the shooting wasn’t justified.
The decision to re-examine both killings was “ridiculous,” Sgt. Barry Donelan, president of the Oakland Police Officers association, told the paper.
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“These cases have been investigated from every angle inside and out by multiple agencies, both criminally and administratively, and the officers have been cleared,” Donelan said. “For…
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