A Kent County judge shot down a motion for a mistrial Wednesday morning on the third day of the murder trial for former Grand Rapids police officer Christopher Schurr.
Schurr is facing a charge of second-degree murder for shooting Patrick Lyoya in the back of the head during a traffic stop on April 4, 2022.
Jurors in the case had been told to expect up to two weeks of testimony, but the case appears to be moving more quickly than expected, as prosecutors rested their case on the trial’s third day. Immediately after Kent County prosecutor Christopher Becker told 17th Circuit Court judge Christina Mims he was resting his case, defense attorneys for Schurr asked for a brief break.
When they came back from break, without the jurors in the room, attorney Mikayla Hamilton made a motion for a mistrial.
“And we believe that the evidence presented prejudice the defendant to the extent that the fundamental goals of accuracy and fairness are threatened,” Hamilton told Mims.
Hamilton said two of the experts that testified as experts on police use of force for the prosecution used standards that were not applicable to Michigan law, and they relied on information about tasers that were not related to the model of taser Schurr used in the traffic stop.
“And at this point we believe that we’re too far along for the jury to simply strike the testimony because they have heard testimony from two of the People’s experts now that do not accurately - and are nowhere near based on what the law is in Michigan and what should be considered.”
Hamilton also made a motion for a “directed verdict,” asking Mims to declare Schurr not guilty herself under a legal provision that allows judges to declare verdicts if they conclude from the evidence presented by prosecutors that “no rational” juror could find the defendant guilty.
Mims said she was prepared to rule on both motions immediately.
“As far as the mistrial is concerned, I do not believe that the experts’ testimony rises to the level of requiring a mistrial,” Mims said, denying the request. “I believe that they were testifying - they clearly were testifying on generally accepted police practices, they never held themselves out to be experts in Michigan law.”
The two experts, Seth Stoughton and Nicholas Bloomfield reviewed video evidence and other records from the case to decide if Schurr acted in the traffic stop as a reasonable officer would, using what they called generally accepted police practices.
Stoughton is a former Florida police officer and a law professor at the University of South Carolina who teaches on the use of force by police officers. Bloomfield is a former police officer who lives in Arizona and consults on police use of force. Both told jurors that Schurr made some accepted decisions during the traffic stop with Lyoya in 2022, but ultimately said no reasonable police officer using general police practices would have shot Lyoya when he was face down on his hands and knees.
Mims said it wasn’t the role of expert witnesses to instruct jurors on Michigan law; that is her role in the case.
“And it was the experts’ job to provide opinions based on - based on how they applied the facts in this case as they have been presented thus far to reliable principles and methods,” Mims said. “And I believe that they did that.”
Mims denied the motion for mistrial, and did not strike the testimony from the record.
She also rejected the motion for a directed verdict, saying that prosecutors have “essentially three elements” to prove in the charge.
The first two: that there was a death, and the death was intentionally caused by Schurr, were not in dispute.
The third element in the charge is that there is no justification for the killing.
“It’s clear that Mr. Lyoya appears to have possession of the defendant’s taser at the time that this shooting occurs,” Mims said, conceding a key point Schurr’s defense team has been making in court. “But it is also clear to the court that a rational trier of fact could find that the alleged victim in this case, Mr. Lyoya, was not in a position to use the taser at the time that the shot that killed him was fired.”
After Mims rejected the two motions, jurors re-entered the courtroom and Schurr’s attorneys called their first witness to continue the case.
That witness, Bob McFarlane, is a video forensics expert who examined multiple videos from the incident, zooming in on key parts. One video he created showed a zoomed in view of Lyoya’s hands in the seconds before Schurr shot him.
In the video, Schurr is on Lyoya’s back, with Lyoya on his hands and knees. Schurr’s taser appears to be fully in Lyoya’s hand, and Lyoya passes it from his left hand to his right hand just before Schurr fires the bullet into the back of Lyoya’s head
