'Some Open Northern Sh**' After the April 1997 shooting of Malik Jones and protests against it, there were T-shirts and bumper stickers in East Haven touting support for Flodquist and the East Haven Police Department. There was a huge rally of support on the East Haven green. There were civil rights marches into East Haven that were met by racial epithets shouted by some East Haven residents that conjured memories of the venom of the old South. There was the attitude of open defiance, of in-your-face, we-don't-care-what-you- think-or-do from whites...In photo Mayor Maturo. [MORE]  From [HERE] and [HERE] A town in Connecticut isn't liable in the 1997 shooting of a black man by a white police officer because evidence failed to show widespread discriminatory conduct that could support an inference that it was known and tolerated by superiors, a federal appeals court in New York ruled Wednesday. The decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals spares the town of East Haven another trial stemming from the shooting of 21-year-old Malik Jones. It was the third time Emma Jones, his mother went to court seeking compensation from East Haven and several of its police officers, including former Officer Robert Flodquist, who fired the fatal shot.

In 2003, a federal jury in Hartford awarded Jones $2.5 million in punitive damages, but that was thrown out four years later by U.S. District Court Judge Alvin W. Thompson. The Court held that municipalities are immune from punitive damages. In 2010, a jury awarded Jones $900,000. Yesterday that award was overturned.

The lawsuit had alleged that the town's custom, policy or usage of deliberate indifference to the rights of black people caused the killing of Jones in violation of his constitutional rights.

The unarmed Jones was shot by an officer after a car chase. The officer said he fired his weapon because he believed Jones was trying to run him over, but the jury disagreed and found that the car began moving only after the officer broke the driver's-side window of the car and shot him. Trial testimony showed that East Haven's population in 2000 was 1.4 percent black and that the police force in much of the 1990s was all white. 

A three-judge panel of the appeals court in Manhattan said it concluded that trial evidence was insufficient to prove the town routinely discriminated because it failed to show a pattern of widespread abusive conduct among officers that would have been known and tolerated by superiors.