Police officer who killed Walter Scott indicted on rare federal civil rights violation

The former South Carolina police officer who last year shot and killed Walter Scott, an unarmed black man who was fleeing a traffic stop, has been indicted by a federal grand jury that charged him with a civil rights violation. The Washington Post reports that in the words of the grand jury, the officer, Michael Slager, deprived Scott of his constitutional right "to be free from the use of unreasonable force by a law enforcement officer" and that Slager shot Scott "without legal justification."

Scott was pulled over by Slager in April 2015 for a non-functioning brake light. Slager shot Scott in the back when Scott tried to flee the scene; a video of the shooting surfaced later, which contradicted Slager's police report. He was indicted last June by a grand jury on a murder charge, making him one of 10 officers charged with a crime in connection to 990 fatal police shootings in 2015, according to The Washington Post.

"Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, all of them, every significant case the Justice Department has investigated and no indictments came down. This is the first time that an indictment has come down in a national case," the Scott family attorney, Chris Stewart, said. "I'm still in a state of shock…I don't know in the past 20 years out of thousands of allegations of police misconduct how often this has happened, if it ever has. The biggest thing is that the general public must understand is how monumental this is."

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Federal civil rights charges against officers are extremely rare, with the Justice Department declining 96 percent of over 13,000 federal civil rights complaints brought against officers since 1995.

"They can't bring Walter back, but if Walter can be the reason that the federal government starts taking these cases… if Walter Scott can be that example then his death wasn’t in vain," Stewart said.