Officer charged in Tyre Nichols’s death strikes plea deal

One of the five former Memphis, Tenn., police officers charged in the death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols has accepted a plea deal for both his state and federal criminal cases.

Federal prosecutors charged Desmond Mills and four other officers in September with excessive force, deliberate indifference, conspiracy to witness tamper and obstruction of justice.

Mills also faced state charges of second-degree murder, aggravated assault, official oppression, two counts of aggravated kidnapping and two counts of official misconduct, which were filed in January.

In federal court Thursday, Mills pleaded guilty to excessive force and conspiracy to witness tamper. He also pleaded guilty to the state charges. He agreed to cooperate with the government as part of his plea deal.

State and federal prosecutors are recommending a 15-year sentence to be served concurrently in the federal prison system, according to Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy’s office. 

Nichols, 29, was killed after a Jan. 7 traffic stop turned deadly. 

Initially, Memphis police officers said Nichols was stopped for reckless driving, though the Memphis police chief later acknowledged there was no evidence to back up that claim.

Video footage of the encounter showed Nichols enduring a brutal beating. He died of his injuries on Jan. 10.

Five former officers — Mills, Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin and Justin Smith — pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and other charges in state court. Mills is the first to agree to change that plea to guilty.

The remaining four officers have a May 6 trial date in federal court. A trial has not yet been set in state court.

Nichols’s death led to renewed calls for police reform, with President Biden, members of the Congressional Black Caucus and advocacy groups around the nation highlighting that Nichols had become one more in a long list of Black men and women who died from police encounters.

In July, the Department of Justice announced that it was investigating the Memphis Police Department over potential constitutional and civil rights violations in the wake of Nichols’s death. 

The plea agreement, according to The Associated Press, sets out Mills’s role in the fatal beating, detailing how he pepper-sprayed Nichols three times before pulling out a baton and yelling, “I’m about to baton the [expletive] out of you.” He repeatedly struck Nichols, who was on the ground and surrounded by officers, never giving him an opportunity to comply with the command, “Give us your hands!”

After the beating, Mills and his fellow officers discussed “taking turns hitting Nichols, hitting Nichols with straight haymakers, and everybody rocking Nichols. During these conversations, the officers discussed hitting Nichols to make him fall and observed that when Nichols did not fall from these blows, they believed they were ‘about to kill’ him,” according to the plea agreement.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Nichols’s family, said Mills’s plea is “entirely consistent” with the allegations in the civil lawsuit against the City of Memphis. 

“We stand strong in our belief that these officers, including Mills, acted at the direction of a policy that not only violated civil rights of innocent civilians but which caused needless pain to many,” Crump said in a statement Thursday.

“The [Memphis Police Department] and its SCORPION unit directed, trained, and encouraged officers like Mills to commit baseless and horrific acts of violence against innocent individuals like Tyre Nichols,” he added. 

Though Mills wasn’t individually responsible for Nichols’s death, Crump said, he and the family “vigorously restate our assertion that those policies were behind what ultimately caused Mills and four other Scorpion officers to kill Tyre Nichols.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.