A suburban Seattle police officer is set to be sentenced Thursday for the 2019 shooting death of a 26-year-old homeless man he was trying to arrest for disorderly conduct outside a convenience store.
A King County jury found Auburn police Officer Jeffrey Nelson guilty on June 27 of second-degree murder and first-degree assault for fatally shooting Jesse Sarey, marking the first conviction under a Washington state law that made it easier to prosecute law enforcement officers for on-duty killings.
Prosecutors plan to ask the judge to sentence Nelson at the top end of the standard range for each count: 18 years in prison for the murder charge and 10 years for the assault, and run them concurrently, according to their sentencing memorandum filed with the court.
“Doing so will reflect Nelson’s long history of violence towards the less powerful, the egregious nature of his conduct, his dishonesty, and the great damage he has caused in our community,” King County Special Prosecutor Patty Eakes said in the memo.
Especially since the homeless man was accused of disorderly conduct and the validity of the arrest is not called into question.
But kicking down is the centrist status quo in the US now apparently.