A former paramedic who injected Elijah McClain with ketamine avoided prison and was sentenced to probation on Friday after his homicide conviction in the Black man’s death, which helped fuel the 2020 racial injustice protests.
Jeremy Cooper faced up to three years in prison. He administered a dose of the sedative to McClain, 23, who had been forcibly restrained after police stopped him as he was walking home in a Denver suburb in 2019.
The sentencing caps a series of trials that stretched over seven months and resulted in the convictions of a police officer and two paramedics. Criminal charges against paramedics and emergency medical technicians involved in police custody cases are rare.
Experts say the convictions would have been unheard of before 2020, when George Floyd’s murder prompted a nationwide reckoning over racist policing and deaths in police custody.
McClain’s mother, Sheneen McClain, said justice had not yet been served. She said the two acquitted Aurora police officers, as well as other firefighters and police on the scene, were complicit in her son’s killing and that they escaped justice.
“I’m waiting on heaven to hand down everybody’s judgment. Because I know heaven ain’t gonna miss the mark,” she told the Associated Press.
At least 94 people died after they were given sedatives and restrained by police from 2012 through 2021, according to findings by the AP in collaboration with Frontline (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism.
McClain’s name became a rallying cry in protests over racial injustice in policing that swept the US in 2020.
“Without the reckoning over criminal justice and how people of color suffer at much higher rates from police use of force and violence, it’s very unlikely that anything would have come of this, that there would have been any charges, let alone convictions,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and expert on racial profiling.
Harris added that the two officers’ acquittals following weeks-long trials were unsurprising.
“It’s still very hard to convict,” he said.
The judge who presided over the hearing on Friday sentenced former paramedic Peter Cichuniec in March to five years in prison for criminally negligent homicide and second-degree assault, the most serious of the charges faced by any of the responders. It was the shortest sentence allowed under the law.
Previously, Judge Mark Warner sentenced officer Randy Roedema to 14 months in jail for criminally negligent homicide and misdemeanor assault.
Prosecutors initially declined to pursue charges related to McClain’s death when an autopsy did not determine how he died. The Democratic governor, Jared Polis, ordered the investigation reopened following the 2020 protests.
The second autopsy said McClain died because he was injected with ketamine after being forcibly restrained.
To Sheneen McClain, it does not make sense that Officer Nathan Woodyard, who stopped her son and put him in a neckhold, was acquitted, while Officer Roedema received a lighter sentence than Cichuniec, the paramedic. She said she believed the paramedics’ role was to cover up what the police had done to her son.
“I raised him by myself and I will continue to stand there for my son, regardless of whether anybody listens to me,” she said.
Many departments, paramedic units and those who train them have re-examined how they treat suspects. It could take years, though, to collect enough evidence to show whether those efforts are working, said Candace McCoy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Cooper injected McClain with ketamine after police stopped him as he was walking home. Officers later referenced a suspicious person report. McClain was not armed, nor accused of breaking any laws.
Medical experts said by the time he received the sedative, McClain already was in a weakened state from forcible restraint that rendered him temporarily unconscious.
He went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital and died three days later.
Cooper’s attorneys did not immediately respond to telephone messages and emails seeking comment on the sentencing.
Since McClain’s death, the Colorado health department has told paramedics not to give ketamine to people suspected of having “excited delirium”, which had been described in a since-withdrawn emergency physician’s report as manifesting symptoms including increased strength. A doctors’ group has called it an unscientific definition rooted in racism.
In October, California became the first state in the nation to ban excited delirium as a cause of death. The state law was prompted by the 2020 death of Angelo Quinto, a 30-year-old navy veteran, who died after a police officer in Antioch, in northern California, knelt on his neck for nearly five minutes. The Contra Costa county district attorney did not file charges against the officers involved in the incident, but the state attorney general began investigating Quinto’s death in 2022.
The protests over McClain and Floyd also ushered in a wave of state legislation to curb the use of neck holds known as carotid restraints, which cut off circulation, and chokeholds, which cut off breathing. At least 27 states including Colorado have passed some limit on the practices. Only two had bans in place before Floyd was killed.