- Police Brutality Watch

A federal judge dealt a stinging setback to the city and the police yesterday by overturning a jury verdict that had cleared the city of liability in the 1999 police shooting of an emotionally disturbed man who was clutching a hammer. The decision granted the family of the man who was killed, Gidone Busch, a new trial seeking damages for the shooting.Judge Johnson, a longtime federal judge who was once a New York police officer himself, said that the jury's verdict was against the weight of the evidence, and that "permitting the verdict to stand would result in a miscarriage of justice.'' Judge Johnson presided at the monthlong trial in Brooklyn federal court last year. Mr. Busch, a 31-year-old Hasidic man was shot 12 times by a group of officers who encircled him on a Borough Park sidewalk. The shooting, in a neighborhood that includes many Hasidic residents, brought allegations that the killing did not draw the same outrage as the questionable police shootings of young black men like Amadou Diallo, a West African immigrant who was shot at 41 times in the Bronx in February 1999. [more

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