From [HERE] A jury with only one black member was selected Monday to hear a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of a mentally-ill African-American man fatally shot by a white cop in Westchester in 2011.
The eight-member panel - including two alternates - is made up of four white women, one white man, two Hispanic women, and one black man.
They will decide the outcome of a $21 million federal suit brought by family of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., 68, who was killed by White Plains police officer Anthony Carelli, 34, on Nov. 19, 2011.
Before opening arguments, lawyers for the Chamberlain family and the White Plains Police Department fought as the jury was whittled down from a pool of 45 candidates. Of that initial group, just three - or 6.6% - were black.
That breakdown of the jury is below the racial makeup of the six suburban counties from which the panelists were drawn. The counties are 68% white, 11% black and 17% Hispanic, according to the latest U.S. Census data. The jury was selected from Westchester, Sullivan, Putnam, Orange, Rockland, and Dutchess counties. [MORE]
Kenneth Chamberlain, a 68-year-old retired Marine, was shot and killed five years ago by White Plains Officer Anthony Carelli in his apartment at 135 S. Lexington Ave. after police broke down his door "to respond" to his medical alert device.
Chamberlain had accidentally triggered his medical alert. His original medical alert was canceled and he repeatedly told police that he didn’t need help, but police forced their way into his apartment anyway and shot him, a heart patient who was unarmed and in his boxer shorts. A former Marine and corrections officer, he had bipolar disorder, as well as arthritis and respiratory illness.
When the medical-alert agency did not get a response from Mr. Chamberlain, it dispatched the police to check on him. Ninety minutes later, after he had been called Nigger and taunted with racial slurs by white cops, according to an audiotape, and subdued by both a Taser weapon and beanbag rounds, he was shot and killed by a bullet from an officer’s .40-caliber pistol.
“At the end, he is saying, ‘Mr. President, I can’t hold them back; they are breaking through,’” said Debra S. Cohen, a lawyer for Mr. Chamberlain’s family, which has filed a civil rights lawsuit against the City of White Plains and the officer who fired the fatal shot. [MORE]