A federal jury in Atlanta, the capital of the U.S. state of Georgia, on Saturday awarded $100 million in damages to a beggar who fell to the ground and broke his neck after a police officer fired a stun gun at him while walking. Chase four years ago.
Lawyer for the stunned beggar, Jerry Blasingame, now 69, summed up his client’s distress by saying he needs round-the-clock care “that costs a million dollars a year and currently owes more than $14 million backed by medical bills.” “, according to attorney Wen Johnson to the jury who found Officer John Grubbs. He used unreasonable force against the then 65-year-old man only because on July 10, 2018 he asked pedestrians and drivers for money like any other beggar.
At that moment, a Grubbs officer arrived with another policeman and found him talking to one of the drivers, so he got out of the patrol car and asked the Blessingham to stop, but the beggar was “frightened of what he was doing.” I don’t know, so he left the street, and Grubbs quickly caught up with him and started chasing him, just because he asked people for money, ”whereby the lawyer summed up what happened, concluding the jury that the “Groups” shocked the beggar with an electric beam that paralyzed it in the lower part of the neck, the shock we hear at the beginning of the video below, after which “Blasingham” passed out.
From the nature of the story the jury heard from the lawyer, it was determined that the Atlanta Police Department was required to pay $60 million in damages to the beggar, in addition to paying $40 million in damages to the shocking officer. , according to what has become known to Al Arabiya.net from what the agencies were broadcasting, and from what was reported in local media citing local WXIA-TV in Atlanta, as well as what was reported on Sunday in the daily newspaper specializing in courts, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, published in Atlanta. The newspaper indicated that Judge Steve Jones could change the jury’s decision by ruling before deliberations began that they could find that an officer “used excessive force” on a beggar who did not commit a serious crime before prosecuting him, and that Officer “Grobs” did not fear for his safety “until the urgent circumstances were so serious that he could use force against an elderly man who was on the run,” the judge wrote last Friday.