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 two other officers were sentenced to three-month suspended sentences.
The sentences were less than what prosecutors had requested.
Persons:
Théo Luhaka
Locations:
Paris, Bobigny