Prosecutors asked Friday for manslaughter charges brought against two Torrance police officers for the 2018 on-duty fatal shooting of Christopher Deandre Mitchell to be dismissed, after the LA County District Attorney’s Office told a judge the evidence in the case does not meet the legal burden of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Officer Matthew Concannon and former officer Anthony Chavez were indicted in 2023 under the tenure of former District Attorney George Gascón, who had campaigned for office with the promise of reopening and potentially prosecuting this case, which a new analysis under DA Nathan Hochman’s office said could play into the defense should the two face trial.
Mitchell was shot to death on Dec. 9, 2018, after Concannon and Chavez spotted a possible stolen car in the parking lot of a grocery store, approached the driver, and said they saw the sawed-off butt stock of a rifle or shotgun between the driver’s legs.
Body worn video cameras were recording as both officers fired into the car. Mitchell was killed, and the weapon turned out to be a pellet gun that resembled a firearm.
In October 2019, the shooting was reviewed by the District Attorney’s Office, then under former DA Jackie Lacey, and the office concluded the shooting was lawful and reasonable.
After Gascón was elected in 2020, he hired former federal prosecutor Lawrence Middleton as a special prosecutor to review police shooting cases, and Middleton obtained the indictment against the officers for voluntary manslaughter.
The motion to dismiss the charges included new analysis of the case completed by Michael Gennaco, the special prosecutor hired by Hochman to replace Middleton on police shooting reviews.
His 26-page review suggested that there might have been a different path to prosecute the shooting under the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter, but for unknown reasons, Middleton didn’t present the case to a grand jury within the three-year statute of limitations for that crime.
Gennaco also noted that Middleton didn’t show grand jurors all of the video of the shooting, and didn’t properly instruct grand jurors on the legal elements required to prove a voluntary manslaughter case.
While the charges were pending defense lawyers for the officers challenged Middleton’s use of the officers’ pre-shooting conduct in assembling the argument that the shooting was unjust, which, after a 2020 change in California law, was allowed to be more fully considered in police shooting evaluations.
Gennaco said one pending appeal of that decision could also lead to the charges being dismissed.
The Mitchell shooting took on greater public interest after it was revealed in 2021 that numerous Torrance Police officers were sending each other racist text messages, including Chavez and Concannon to varying degrees.
Those messages were referenced by Middleton as potential evidence of racial bias, but Gennaco said it was far from certain whether they could be admissible in a prosecution, as it was difficult to clearly connect the text messages to the Mitchell case directly.
NBC Los Angeles has reached out to the defense attorneys for Concannon and Chavez.