by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:

Sacramento, CA – As TFTP reported, last year, disturbing body camera footage was released from a police shooting that took the life of a father who was confronted in his grandparents’ backyard and then gunned down because officers claimed his phone was a gun. Now, after Sacramento Police Department officers Terrance Mercadal and Jared Robinet escaped any and all accountability, they will be going back to work—to potentially kill other unarmed fathers in their backyards.

On Thursday, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott and FBI agent Sean Ragan said that they have closed their investigation into the fatal shooting of Stephon Clark, according to ABC 10. They said they found insufficient evidence to support criminal charges and now the officers are back on full duty.

“This incident has been thoroughly investigated by law enforcement agencies at the local, state and federal levels,” Police Chief Daniel Hahn said, noting that his cops are now back on patrol. “Every one of these independent examinations has reached the same finding – the use of deadly force in this case was lawful.”

Apparently shooting an unarmed father as he complied with officers’ orders to get on the ground, is “lawful.” Shameful indeed.

“My brother was killed, unarmed, in my grandmother’s backyard, and the same cop who killed him is back on the streets patrolling other communities, running through other people’s backyards,”  Stephon Clark’s brother, Stevante told ABC10 Thursday afternoon. “I’m uneasy with that. My heart is broken.”

“We still want people to be held accountable. We don’t want killer cops on our streets,” Stevante said. “We will continue to fight for justice. Justice delayed is justice denied and, today, justice was denied for Stephon Clark, for the third time.”

The National Lawyers Guild also issued a scathing statement in regard to the officers returning to duty.

“We are not surprised at the news that those who killed Stephon Clark have been ‘cleared.’ It follows the trend across the country where officers are rarely charged and in the rare instances that they are charged, no liability is found by investigating agencies, who are either law enforcement or district attorneys, who have an inherent bias toward police.

This news comes after a lawsuit that was settled earlier this month that held the taxpayers of Sacramento liable for Clark’s death.

According to ABC 10, the city of Sacramento agreed to pay Clark’s two sons and their attorneys a total sum of $2.4 million, court documents show. Each child will get $893,113 after attorney’s fees.

“Minor Plaintiffs A.C. and C.C. suffered damages and loss as a result of the death of their father, Stephon Clark,” the court documents read. “The minor Plaintiffs is deprived of and will continue to suffer a deprivation of their familial relationship with their father.”

Clark, 23, was shot and killed by two Sacramento Police officers around 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, March 18, 2018. While the department promised to release the body camera footage within 30 days, a flurry of attention on social media prompted an early release of videos that showed the shooting from a body camera worn by one of the officers, and from the helicopter that was circling above.

Police initially received a call about a suspect breaking into cars in the neighborhood and they dispatched multiple officers and a helicopter in response. The video from the helicopter begins with an operator claiming that the suspect has just broken a window and was attempting to try to get into a house.

The video shows a man jumping over a fence from one backyard to another and then walking up to a vehicle parked at the house and looking in the window. However, when the operator in the helicopter described his actions, he said that man was “running for the front yard” and then “looking into another car in between the fence and the front yard.”

The officers can then be seen approaching the backyard of the house where the man is, with their guns drawn. The man disappears from the view of the helicopter video, and within seconds, the operator yells “Shots fired! Shots fired!” as the officers shoot and kill a man standing on the back porch of the house.

What’s more, the infrared version of the chopper video appears to show Clark lay down on the ground and comply with the officers’ orders—before they dumped another dozen rounds into him.

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