How Prosecutors Secured Convictions in a Trial Over Tyre Nichols’s Death

Federal prosecutors painted a picture of officers who did not stop one another from pummeling Mr. Nichols even when he did not pose a threat.

A jury on Thursday convicted three former Memphis police officers on federal witness tampering charges in connection with the beating and death of Tyre Nichols. The officers were acquitted of the most serious charge — violating his civil rights by causing his death.

Federal prosecutors had called nearly 20 witnesses as they pressed their argument that the former officers, Demetrius Haley, Tadarrius Bean and Justin Smith, had both deprived Mr. Nichols of his civil rights in a Jan. 7, 2023, traffic stop and conspired to lie about it.

Taken together, the testimony painted a picture of officers who did not stop one another from pummeling or restraining Mr. Nichols, a 29-year-old Black FedEx worker, even when he did not pose a threat. And it captured an overarching culture in the Memphis Police Department that allowed for secrecy and excessive punishment, especially when a person tried to flee police custody.

Here are some of the key revelations from the prosecution’s case.

Two former officers who took part in the beating testified that Tyre Nichols did not present a threat.

Five former Memphis officers, all of whom are Black, were indicted on federal charges last September. Two have since pleaded guilty to some of the charges.

When one of those two officers, Emmitt Martin III, took the stand, he described a tumultuous few days back on the job after he had been hit by a person fleeing in their car and sidelined to a desk role. Already angry about a lack of arrests that night in January 2023, he said he saw Mr. Nichols speed up to beat a red light and soon initiated a traffic stop.

Mr. Nichols, he repeatedly said, “wasn’t a threat.” But Mr. Martin also described how officers imposed what prosecutors called a “run tax”: extra violence against anyone who ran from the police, which would never be disclosed to their superiors.

The other officer to take the stand, Desmond Mills Jr., corroborated much of Mr. Martin’s description of the pressure that was put on the Police Department’s street-crime unit, known as Scorpion. And he echoed that officers had a tendency to exert a physical punishment on people who fled. Mr. Mills was the first to offer an apology for his actions, sobbing after he watched his body camera footage in court.

Doctors and emergency workers said they were not told how severely Mr. Nichols had been beaten.

Multiple medical and emergency personnel testified not only to the extent of Mr. Nichols’s injuries, but also that they were not fully informed about the violence he had endured.

“It was an eerie feeling,” said Jesse James Guy III, a former paramedic with the Memphis Fire Department who treated Mr. Nichols at the scene of the beating. He said no one relayed that Mr. Nichols had been punched, struck in the head or kicked.

Dr. Michelle Surbrook, an emergency room doctor at St. Francis Hospital, said Mr. Nichols arrived there in cardiac arrest, and had a broken front tooth and blood in his mouth.

“It was unusual to have such a young person come in with cardiac arrest,” Dr. Surbrook said.

And Taylor Chesser, a nurse in the emergency room, said it was clear that the cause of the injuries was “not a natural circumstance.” She also said that the officers who arrived with Mr. Nichols told her they were not at the scene, and described their demeanor as “nervous.”

Dr. Marco Ross, the chief medical examiner at the West Tennessee Regional Medical Center, said that there was tearing across three different areas of Mr. Nichols’s brain. He testified that if Mr. Nichols had survived, he most likely would have required permanent nursing care. He classified the death as a homicide.

Some officers had used excessive force before.

Prosecutors sketched out a pattern of excessive force among members of the Scorpion unit, which was disbanded soon after Mr. Nichols’s death.

They focused on the July 2022 arrest of Jesus Valles, during which body camera footage showed Mr. Haley hit a handcuffed Mr. Valles in the side of the head. (Mr. Haley wrote in a report that the hit was to stop Mr. Valles from spitting on him.)

Prosecutors also highlighted the November 2022 arrest of Marcus Bills, where body camera footage captured Mr. Haley punching Mr. Bills — handcuffed after slipping away from the police — asking, “You wanna play?”

Mr. Martin was present at the July arrest, and Mr. Bean at the November one. Mr. Smith was not involved in either arrest.

Former and current police officers also described the so-called run tax, or punishment for people who fled from the police. Officer James Harvey, a former Scorpion unit member, summed it up as, “If you run from the police, you get hurt.”

Former Lt. Dewayne Smith, who supervised the five men on their Scorpion unit and retired a day before his own disciplinary hearing connected to the beating, said that on Jan. 7, 2023, the force used was “too much for that incident, too much.”

There was a culture of silence in the Memphis Police Department.

There were several instances where current and former police officers acknowledged under questioning that they did not report the use of excessive force or inappropriate behavior.

Mr. Martin said, “As a team, we’re not going to tell on each other.” He also said it was his practice to put a running body camera on the dashboard, to register that it was on without filming anything notable.

Officer Harvey also said he did not report instances that he witnessed: “I didn’t want to be considered an outcast,” he told the court.

Mr. Harvey also acknowledged that he lied to the F.B.I. in June 2023 about what he saw during Mr. Valles and Mr. Bills’s arrests, telling lawyers, “I was scared to speak out.”

Kyle Coudriet, a former Memphis police officer, acknowledged that he also lied to the F.B.I.

“There are things I was untruthful about,” he said.

During his testimony, Mr. Coudriet acknowledged briefly covering his body camera during Mr. Valles’s arrest, telling prosecutors that he “had a feeling a situation like this would arise and I’d be sitting here.”

An F.B.I. agent said some of the defendants acknowledged their role in the beating.

Anthony Householder, an F.B.I. agent who helped investigate Mr. Nichols’s death, said both Mr. Smith and Mr. Bean took responsibility for their roles in the beating and acknowledged withholding some information.

In a voluntary interview with agents, Mr. Smith said that Mr. Nichols “shouldn’t have died that night,” Mr. Householder said. The former officer also said he didn’t provide more details because he didn’t think the situation would be “that bad” or that Mr. Nichols would die.

Mr. Smith, he added, started to cry at one point.

When Mr. Bean sat down for his interview, he also accepted accountability for his role, Mr. Householder said. And he, too, said that he had withheld some information because he didn’t want to be labeled a “snitch.”

Prosecutors also showed a text message that Mr. Haley sent to another officer, in which he wrote it was “us” who participated in the beating.