By Kanishka Singh
(Reuters) -A white sheriff’s deputy in Georgia who fatally shot a Black man who previously was freed from prison after exoneration will not face criminal charges following a local prosecutor’s conclusion that the officer’s use of force was reasonable.
The officer, Buck Aldridge, had pulled over Leonard Allan Cure, 53, in October 2023 along Interstate 95 in Camden County near the Florida border while Cure was driving to visit his mother. The Camden County Sheriff’s Office has said that Cure was pulled over for driving more than 100 miles (161 km) per hour in a 70 miles (113 km) per hour zone.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said the deputy told Cure he was under arrest but Cure failed to comply with the officer’s requests and assaulted him. Before shooting, the deputy used a Taser and a baton in an effort to subdue Cure, the agency said.
The Camden County Sheriff’s Office said on Wednesday that Keith Higgins, the district attorney for the Brunswick Judicial District, concluded that Aldridge’s use of force was “objectively reasonable.”
“The pursuit of criminal charges, therefore, is not warranted,” Higgins said in a statement.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents Cure’s family, called the decision not to bring charges “a devastating failure of justice.” Cure was exonerated in 2020 after serving 16 years for an armed robbery conviction.
Several high-profile killings of Black people in recent years led to anti-racism protests against police brutality in the United States and elsewhere, particularly after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)
