By Brendan O’Brien
(Reuters) – A Minnesota prosecutor said on Monday she has dropped charges against a state trooper in the shooting death of a black motorist last summer after learning the officer would testify he acted in self-defense, making a conviction unlikely.
In explaining her decision, Hennepin County Attorney Maria Moriarty quoted a statement from an attorney for the trooper, Ryan Londregan, during an April hearing in Hennepin District Court in Minneapolis.
The attorney told the court that his client planned to tell a jury that he shot Ricky Cobb II during a traffic stop because he thought Cobb was reaching for his service pistol, putting a fellow officer in immediate danger, Moriarty said.
“Expert witnesses in use-of-force cases focus almost exclusively on the seconds in which the shots occurred and what a reasonable officer could have observed,” she said at a news conference, noting that body camera video was inconclusive as backup up his claim.
“We don’t believe we would have even gotten through a jury,” she added during a media briefing.
On Sunday, Moriarty’s office said in a statement that filing a letter of dismissal for involuntary murder and manslaughter against Londregan was not the same as an exoneration.
On July 31, 2023, Londregan and other troopers stopped Cobb, 33, in Minneapolis. The officers told Cobb that he was wanted for a crime in another county and that they planned to arrest him, according to the complaint filed against Londregan.
Londregan shot Cobb twice after the motorist put the car in gear and took his foot off the brake when another officer reached into the vehicle and tried to unbuckle his seat belt, the complaint said.
Moriarty said prosecutors should have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the use of deadly force was not justified.
“Ricky Cobb should be alive today,” Moriarty said. “Our inability to move forward makes it even more difficult for Mr. Cobb’s family and for our community.”
Cobb’s murder took place in the same city where George Floyd was killed by a police officer in 2020. The killing sparked a weeks-long wave of racial justice protests around the world, drawing attention to police killings of black people in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Less than a year later, in another traffic stop that turned fatal for a black man in the Minneapolis area, former police officer Kimberly Potter killed motorist Daunte Wright. Potter was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.
(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Rod Nickel)
