PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A former Philadelphia police officer who shot and killed a motorist during a traffic stop was sentenced and granted parole Thursday by a judge, eliciting condemnations from the city’s district attorney and the victim’s family.
Judge Glenn Bronson sentenced Mark Dial to 9 1/2 months in jail, and immediately granted Dial parole because he had already been jailed for 10 months following his arrest in 2023.
A jury in May acquitted Dial, 29, of murder charges, and instead convicted him of voluntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and possessing an instrument of crime in the fatal shooting of 27-year-old Eddie Irizarry.
Brian McMonagle, Dial’s lawyer, said the judge did the right thing for a “dedicated public servant” who “risked his life every day for perfect strangers.”
District Attorney Larry Krasner said the judge went “way below” sentencing guidelines in handing down a sentence that set Dial free. The low end of the standard range of sentencing guidelines for the conviction was 4 1/2 to nine years in prison, he said.
Krasner declined to criticize the judge but said he was “deeply disappointed with a verdict that I think makes people lose faith in the criminal justice system.”
Zoraida Garcia, an aunt of Irizarry’s, told reporters after the sentencing that if she had committed the crime, “I would have been doing life in prison. But he’s a cop, so he gets the OK.” Another aunt, Ana Cintron, said, “my nephew’s life doesn’t matter at all.”
In court, Bronson said the shooting was not “a classic voluntary manslaughter case,” that Dial’s conduct was “demonstrably out of character” and that Dial was not a threat to the public, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
He also said that Dial, after shooting Irizarry six times, rushed Irizarry to the hospital.
“I’ve never seen that happen in a voluntary manslaughter case,” he said.
Dial’s lawyers have insisted that the 2023 shooting was justified.
They say Dial thought Irizarry had a gun when he approached Irizarry’s car after officers spotted the car being driven erratically and followed it for several blocks before it turned the wrong way down a one-way street and stopped.
Police body camera video of the shooting shows Dial getting out of a police SUV, striding over to Irizarry’s car and firing his weapon six times at close range through the rolled-up driver’s side window.
The video shows Irizarry holding a seven-inch knife before he was shot.
Another officer yelled “knife” as they had approached the vehicle, according to the video, but Dial’s attorneys disputed those assertions, saying the other officer yelled “Gun!,” that the knife resembled a gun and that Dial had acted lawfully and in self-defense.
Dial was released from custody in 2024 after prosecutors withdrew a first-degree murder charge.
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