Peter Liang Sentenced: Brooklyn Cop Will Serve No Jail Time for Killing Akai Gurley

A group of Peter Liang supporters rallied outside Brooklyn federal court Tuesday. Photo by John V. Santore

By SIMONE WILSON and JOHN V. SANTORE

DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN, NY — Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Danny Chun has spared former NYPD officer Peter Liang, 28, from serving time in prison for fatally shooting unarmed East New York resident and recent father Akai Gurley, then 28, in 2014.

Liang was instead sentenced Tuesday to five years of probation and 800 hours of community service.

Justice Chun also reduced the ex-cop's manslaughter conviction, decided by a jury in February, to "criminally negligent homicide." (A downgrade that the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office quickly promised to appeal.)

“This is the lowest level of felony," Chun said in court Tuesday. "Nonetheless, it is still a felony. However, I find that — given the defendant's background and given how remorseful he is — it would not be necessary to incarcerate the defendant to have a just sentence.”

Gurley's girlfriend, Melissa Butler, sobbed in court as the sentence came down, covering her face with her hands.

Back in November 2014, Liang, then a rookie cop, had been patrolling a dark stairwell at the Louis Pink Houses in East Near York when he reportedly got spooked and fired his gun into the darkness.

Gurley and his girlfriend, Butler, were also in the stairwell at the time. The bullet from Liang's gun bounced off a wall and struck Gurley in the chest, killing him, according to prosecutors for the Brooklyn DA.

As supporters for both the victim and his accidental killer rallied outside Brooklyn federal court Tuesday — and as both their family members anxiously awaited a verdict inside — Joseph Alexis, a DA prosecutor, could be heard telling Gurley's distraught relatives: "Everybody's got to calm down. Everything is all right."

In February, Liang was found guilty of manslaughter for killing Gurley.

He was also found guilty of "official misconduct." That's because Liang's trial revealed that neither the officer nor his partner, Shaun Landau, administered CPR to Gurley — a task that was instead left to the victim's untrained girlfriend, Melissa Butler.

Both Liang and Landau were fired by the NYPD following the conviction.

During the highly publicized trial, multiple officers testified that the department failed to provide its personnel proper CPR training. The NYPD subsequently stripped the badge and gun from the instructor who taught Liang's CPR class.

Upon Liang's conviction in February, Asian-American groups staged large protests across New York City. They argued that the officer, who is Chinese-American, was being handled more harshly than white officers.

Flushing resident Joseph Lin told Patch outside the courthouse Tuesday that his community is only looking for "equal justice."

"We think we're being scapegoated," the protester said. He called Gurley's death a "pure accident," and said he thought Liang was unfairly "tried by the public first."

Police-reform advocates, however, praised Liang's February conviction as the first time in more than a decade that an NYPD officer had been found guilty of killing a citizen. (In the last case on record, Officer Bryan Conroy was found guilty of “criminally negligent homicide” — one step down from manslaughter — for killing African immigrant Ousmane Zongo in a raid on a Manhattan warehouse. Conroy served no jail time.)

Then, in March, Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson recommended that Liang — who was facing as many as 15 years behind bars — serve no jail time.

The DA argued in an open letter of sorts to Supreme Court Judge Danny Chun that "Liang has no prior criminal history and poses no future threat to public safety. Because his incarceration is not necessary to protect the public, and due to the unique circumstances of this case, a prison sentence is not warranted."

Instead, Thompson called for five years of probation, six months of home arrest and 500 hours of community service.

In early April, Liang's attorneys moved for a mistrial, alleging that a juror on the case, Michael Vargas, had deliberately hidden information about his past as part of a plan to conceal an anti-cop agenda.

Chun agreed to postpone Liang's sentencing, originally scheduled for April 14, while Vargas was cross-examined. However, the judge ended up denying the mistrial motion last Friday.