Late last week, an Oklahoma jury returned guilty verdicts against two former cops who killed an unarmed man in 2019 after Tasering him more than 50 times. Online records confirm that Brandon Dingman, 35, and Joshua Taylor, 27, were convicted Friday of second-degree murder and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
The two men, former members of the police force in Wilson, Okla., will be sentenced on Dec. 2 and face 10 years to life behind bars. On July 4, 2019, Dingman and Taylor responded to a call about a disorderly man.
The officers arrived to find a naked 28-year-old Jared Lakey in a ditch.
During the course of their nine-minute-long interaction, Lakey allegedly failed to comply with the officers’ verbal commands. Dingman, according to court documents, “deployed his taser 23 times” on Lakey. Taylor “deployed his taser 30 times,” the court documents note. They used their Tasers on Lakey until he became unresponsive.
Prosecutors argued in court documents that Tasering someone 53 times “greatly exceeded what would have been necessary or warranted by the attendant circumstances.” Body camera footage from the incident shows that Lakey never tried to hurt the officers and was not acting aggressively. Experts testified that, over the course of those nine minutes, Lakey experienced over 3 minutes of electroshock. Lakey died two days after being Tasered by the officers. While medical examiners acknowledged Lakey’s heart was enlarged, they found that the violence inflicted by the officers directly contributed to his death.
Attorneys for both men told the New York Times they will appeal the verdict.