The facts surrounding the death of Elijah McClain at the hands of Aurora police and paramedics in 2019 have never changed.
Despite that, a state court of appeals decision last week upended two of the fact-based, hard-fought court battles to hold some of the cops and paramedics accountable for McClain’s death.
McClain, a 23-year-old Black man, was doing nothing wrong when he was accosted by police. He was unarmed and walking home in northwest Aurora on a summer night with only a bag of soft drinks.
The professional massage therapist was treated like a criminal, petrified because Aurora police were escalating and acting toward him in a terrifying, aggressive way that Black men in the country deeply fear.
He was wrongly attacked by police and strangled, nearly to death. A rogue cop with a police dog threatened to have the dog maul him as he was being molested by police.
When paramedics arrived, they took not just cues but orders from police, injecting McClain with a lethal overdose of ketamine. They did it because police and medics then believed in a now-debunked episode of “excited delirium,” where people crazed with drugs, fear or the will of God assume superhuman strengths and do crazy crap.
Paramedics Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec never treated McClain with the same level of care we’ve all seen on a hundred medical shows or experienced in emergencies ourselves. That included monitoring his pulse and other vitals before injecting him with the Ketamine, making an accurate body mass assessment of the slight 140-pound McClain, or pausing to consider that he could be at risk by injecting him with a sedative depressant just after being choked into unconsciousness.
All of these and hundreds of other sordid, horrifying details of what police and paramedics did to McClain that night aren’t subjective recollections or hearsay. We all saw the video tapes from officer body cameras and other recordings as McClain was first harassed, then tortured and then ruthlessly killed.
This was not an instance of policing nor emergency medicine. It was cruel, reckless and negligent homicide, just like the jury decided in 2023.
On Thursday, an appeals-court panel ordered Cooper and Chichuniec to stand trial again for the charges against them, saying that the jury was improperly instructed on what to consider during their deliberations as to what the “standard of care” should have been used by Aurora paramedics during their encounter with McClain and police.
While this may sound confusing, it’s not. The paramedics were charged not just with some kind of medical malpractice violation, but with being so “negligent” in their duties as paramedics that the death they caused was criminal in nature. This is the kind of conviction someone gets when they blow through a red light at 80 mph and takes out a pedestrian just trying to get across the street.
For weeks, state prosecutors made it clear to jurors that the two paramedics never made their own assessment of McClain when they arrived; they took the corrupt word of police, who’d attacked McClain, and compliantly dosed him with a deadly quantity of a powerful sedative.
The “standard of care” question arose from the jury as to how to gauge how paramedics should have behaved, which they’d just listened about for weeks during testimony.
The legal code around criminal negligence charges says that the threshold is what a “reasonable person” would do.
Yes, it’s pretty subjective. But a reasonable person wouldn’t blow through a red light at 80 mph, and it’s pretty easy for a jury to understand that and decide for a conviction.
Likewise, a “reasonable person” wouldn’t arrive on the scene of police chaos and let them tell you how to treat a patient, as a paramedic.
While the high-court panel may have a valid technical point as to whether the trial judge in the case belabored the definition enough to suit the jury, a “reasonable person” and adjudicator in the matter would be able to see that the jury was afforded every scrap of evidence and testimony both for and against convictions against Cooper and Chichuniec.
The jury unanimously found for the prosecution.
Tragically, for McClain’s mother and family, and for the endless Black people in Aurora and far beyond, this is just another instance of justice denied.
“How many more times can we systemically fumble the life of another human being and not really look at the inequities inside of those systems?” said Candice Bailey, an Aurora activist who stood with Elijah’s mother, Sheneen McClain, through endless court hearings and protests, trying to leverage the truth into accountability.
“This decision forces the family and community to once again revisit one of the most painful chapters in Aurora’s history,” members of the regional and Aurora NAACP said in a statement. “To subject the family to this agony on the idea that a jury barraged with medical evidence didn’t understand the issue seems inconsistent with the jury’s findings and the appellate rules, while also being cruel to the family.”
Seems inconsistent?
The consistency here is a system of justice that provably continues to have different outcomes for white people than it produces for people of color.
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