For Many, Charleston, S.C., Police Shooting Trial May Finally Offer A Turning Point

Jury selection starts Monday in the case of former North Charleston, S.C., officer Michael Slager. The white ex-cop is accused of murder in the shooting death of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man last year.

The killing was captured on video.

It started with a traffic stop in April 2015. Slager stopped Scott for a broken brake light on the Mercedes Benz he was driving.

Video from Slager's dashcam shows the officer at the driver's window, asking for his driver's license and questioning Scott about documents for the car. After Slager returns to his patrol car, Scott jumps out of the car and runs. Slager gives chase, and there's an off-camera confrontation.

That's where a bystander video picks up. He records the scene unfolding in an empty lot, and it's startling. Scott is running away from the officer when Slager opens fire.

Slager said Scott had his taser, but the bystander video that surfaced a few days after the shooting appears to contradict this story. Once it was public, the North Charleston Police Department fired the officer, and a grand jury indicted him for murder.

Andy Savage, Slager's defense attorney, plans to argue that Slager acted in accordance with his police training.

"The whole focus of our case really is in a matter of nanoseconds. What was in Slager's mind at the instant that he decided to use lethal force?" Savage tells NPR.

In several other high-profile cases like this — in Baltimore, for instance — prosecutors have not won convictions against police officers.

"We've seen what happened in Baltimore. Nobody killed Freddie Gray. So the folks in Charleston, we want to see him go to jail and send a message to other officers that if you do, it's a harsh penalty to pay," says Rev. Thomas Ravenell from Empowerment Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston. "Anything else less than that I think the people in the city will be very upset."

Standing beneath a Spanish-moss draped oak tree, Ravenell gestures toward the center of a vacant lot that spans a block in a commercial section of North Charleston.

"That's where he was gunned down. Somewhere in here," he says. After the shooting, Ravenell helped start the North Charleston Civil Reform Coalition to push for a citizen review board and other police reforms.

"There's always been that great dislike between the police department here and the black community," he says.

Suburban North Charleston is an industrial and commercial center. African-Americans make up nearly half the population, yet the police force is about 75 percent white.

The city of North Charleston agreed to pay Scott's family $6.5 million in an out of court civil settlement. Now, Ravenell says, people are looking for criminal justice in the Slager murder trial.

A validated voice

The site of the shooting has become a sort of sacred space for Muhiyidin d'Baha, an organizer with the Charleston chapter of Black Lives Matter. He calls it Walter Scott's memorial garden.

"We planted a bunch of seeds here in the area where he was murdered," he says.

But it's hard to see anything budding in the weedy field. This is private property, and markers left in tribute have been removed. A few teddy bears remain in a chain link fence surrounding the lot, but they're obscured by vines and a pile of tree limbs cleaned up after Hurricane Matthew.

D'Baha says Slager's trial has the potential to be a turning point. He hopes the video can be the difference, because it changes the dynamic of pitting a black man's word against a white officer.

"This case can get us over that hump," he says. "In the courts, we can finally have our voice be validated. So we can have a little bit of faith within using the court system to get justice and equal things out."

In addition to the state murder count, Slager also faces federal criminal charges of depriving Scott of his rights under color of law.

The fact that Slager faces charges at all is significant, says reporter Barney Blakeney, who writes for the Charleston Chronicle, the local black newspaper.

"In my 40-year police reporting career, this is first time any police officer has been brought to task for an unarmed shooting," he says.

The challenge for Slager's defense will be how to prevent the case from turning into an indictment of policing in America. Savage says he plans to address it with the jury from the get go.

"That this is the scourge of country. This is something that should be talked about, this is something that should be argued at the kitchen table and at public forums but this is not the place to do it during the trial of Michael Slager," he says.

Savage won't say at this point whether Slager will testify in his own defense.

If convicted, he faces up to life in prison.

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