Judge: Black Man Beaten by a Gang of White Philadelphia Cops was Stopped For No Legitimate Reason: All Evidence in Criminal Case Dismissed

From [HERE] A Pennsylvania judge has ruled that police illegally stopped a 22-year-old unarmed black man in Philadelphia before a dozen mostly white officers surrounded him and beat him in an encounter captured on video .

Common Pleas Judge Kai Scott on Wednesday ruled that drugs police seized from Tyree Carroll cannot be admitted as evidence because the arresting officer wasn’t legally permitted to stop and search Carroll, Newsworks.org reported (http://bit.ly/2lVBT4W).

A spokesman for the Philadelphia district attorney said prosecutors haven’t decided whether to appeal to Superior Court.

Carroll was supposedly riding his bike the wrong way down a one-way street in Germantown when he was stopped by a plainclothes police officer April 3, 2015, shortly before midnight on East Locust Avenue.

Apparently cops stopped him and then threw him off the bike, and put him in a chokehold. [MORE]

Police, though, said Carroll was stopped over a suspected narcotics violation. Carroll was on probation at the time from a marijuana-possession conviction - something police knew nothing about as they approached him in the street.

In order for the police to stop you the Supreme Court has ruled that police must have reasonable articulable suspicion that there is criminal activity afoot and that you are involved in the activity. Police may not act on on the basis of an inchoate or unclear and unparticularized suspicion or a hunch - there must be some specific articulable facts along with reasonable inferences from those facts to justify the intrusion. The court found that his right to be free from unreasonable detention by law enforcement was violated, and because the search was conducted through exploitation of that illegal detention, all evidence seized must be suppressed as a fruit of the illegal stop.

After calling for backup, more than a dozen white officers arrived on the scene, several flocking around him to kick, punch and shout obscenities at Carroll.

As one officer approached a restrained Carroll, the officer said, "Here comes the Taser," but police maintain that it was never used on Carroll.

Scott rejected the argument made by Assistant District Attorney Whitney Golden that since Carroll bit an officer, it didn’t matter whether the initial stop was legal. The bite, Golden argued, gave police the right to arrest Carroll for assault.

Carroll’s defense attorney, Michael Wiseman, called that logic “mind-boggling.”

Wiseman said without the evidence, the district attorney’s office will be forced to dismiss the case.

At a hearing on Tuesday, Carroll covered his ears as the judge watched a video of the beating that has been viewed nearly 200,000 times on YouTube. [MORE]

Last July, when the cellphone video of the violent police response was released, the department announced it was launching an Internal Affairs investigation into the April 2015 incident. No officers were found to have committed any wrongdoing, according to a source who read a report on the completed probe.

Nancy Carroll says her grandson Tyree "was treated like a dog" when he was arrested in April. [MORE]