Dierra Fields, the Akron woman who was body slammed and arrested by an Akron Police officer in January, was found not guilty of two charges Thursday evening after a daylong trial in Akron Municipal Court.
The eight-member jury took less than two hours to reach its verdict on the charges of resisting arrest and obstructing official business. The trial focused largely on the appropriateness of the officers’ actions during a heated family argument in January.
“I already feel like I have my life back,” Fields said after the trial, surrounded by relatives and supporters as tears welled up in her eyes. “I can move on.”
Signal Akron first reported on the incident in April and, shortly after, Akron’s new independent police auditor, Anthony Finnell, released a report that found Officer Thomas Shoemaker’s body slam of Fields was not reasonable and that there was no probable cause for either of the charges Fields faced. Finnell also called for an investigation into Sgt. Timothy Shmigal for not intervening in the use-of-force incident.
In court, City of Akron prosecutors took an opposing position to that of the city’s police auditor: Shoemaker and Shmigal were the prosecution’s only witnesses at trial.
The city argued that Fields obstructed official business by yelling and arguing with her family members inside her house while Shoemaker and Shmigal were trying to gain control of the scene and that she resisted arrest when she turned her torso while Shoemaker was handcuffing her and lost his grip.
Assistant City Prosecutor Laci Volcheck, who is also the senior police legal adviser, argued police were right to arrest Fields because she didn’t “sit down, shut up” like police told her and that she could have potentially become violent when she turned her torso while Shoemaker was trying to handcuff her.
“She now has a handcuff on her left hand that she could use as a weapon,” Volcheck told the jury.
Judge prevents the defense from introducing auditor’s report
Fields’ defense attorney, Imokhai Okolo, argued that the police were “flat out wrong” in the incident, that Fields never resisted arrest, since Shoemaker told her she wasn’t under arrest while handcuffing her, and that she at no point hindered the officers from investigating a family argument. There was no evidence she committed the crimes she was accused of, he said.
Judge Jerry Larson repeatedly prevented Okolo from mentioning or asking about Finnell’s report, which stated there was a lack of probable cause for the charges and that the use of force was against department policy.
Larson previously ruled that Okolo couldn’t call Finnell to testify and that any previous use-of-force incidents by Shoemaker could not be mentioned during the trial. Larson’s rulings limited Okolo’s ability to argue an “affirmative defense” on the resisting-arrest charge, which means that an officer’s “excessive or unnecessary force” is a defense to the crime.
“Some of the most frustrating things about being a trial attorney [are] having to deal with judges who oftentimes, sometimes, just don’t get it right,” Okolo said after the trial. “For some reason, they make the wrong decisions, make the wrong comments, and you’re stressing sitting there thinking about how this is going to affect the case.”
The trial centered on dueling interpretations of video from body cameras worn by the APD officers who showed up to the Fields family’s Kenmore home on Jan. 11. Shoemaker and, later, Shmigal, arrived that day to find a chaotic family argument. Fields and several other family members were yelling back and forth in the living room.
During the encounter, Shoemaker approached Fields and attempted to handcuff her. When she turned her torso to question the officer, Shoemaker lost his grip on one of her wrists.
At that point, he immediately grabbed each of her biceps from behind and pulled her in. He bent his knees, pulled Fields to his right side, sprung up and propelled the 5’3” woman in the air, violently slamming her face-down on the ground.
At trial, Okolo hammered the timeline of the charges: She was initially only charged with resisting arrest, but that charge inherently requires another charge to be arrested on. Only after prosecutors contacted police in March did the charge of obstructing official business get added.
Shoemaker said he “made a mistake” and forgot about the obstructing official business charge on the scene.
Shmigal testified Fields should have been charged with obstructing official business at the scene because force was used against her.
“When we take someone to the ground, it’s an automatic obstructing [official business charge],” Shmigal said.
Shoemaker and Shmigal testified that Fields hindered their investigation into the family argument when she asked multiple times to leave the house and wait in her car during the incident. She was not free to leave and was threatened with arrest by Shoemaker if she did.
“She’s 100% obstructing” by asking to leave, Shoemaker said. By loudly arguing with relatives, Shmigal said Fields was “violent, hostile, agitated, continuously screaming, disorderly.”
“Is ‘screaming’ violence, though?” Okolo asked on cross examination.
“No, but it can lead to it,” Shmigal responded. “… We’re preventing something that could have happened.”
The body slam testimony
Shoemaker testified that he did not body slam Fields. A body slam, he said, is when somebody lifts someone over their head “like the WWE.” Shoemaker merely “pushed her off balance. … I don’t think I’m physically strong enough to pick her up.”
Fields did not testify, and the defense called no witnesses.
“The video speaks for itself,” Okolo told the jury.
Fields took a risk by taking her charges to trial instead of agreeing to plead guilty to lesser charges, which the prosecutor’s office offered months ago. She didn’t believe she did anything wrong, she said at the time, and didn’t want to plead to any lesser charge, even though losing at trial could mean jail time.
“This is why I did it,” she said after her acquittal. “When you know you’re right, you’re right. When you know you’re wrong, you’re wrong. I’m an honest person even about myself. I knew I had more to gain by fighting than not.”
In addition to a clean criminal record, the jury verdict means Fields could gain more. Okolo believes Fields was only charged with a crime so the city could convict her of something, which would limit her ability to sue for excessive force.
The acquittal in her Akron Municipal Court criminal case sets Fields up to more likely be successful if she files a federal civil rights case.
Editor’s note: News photography in the courtroom was prohibited by the judge, despite the presence of Akron Beacon Journal Photographer Mike Cardew and Signal Akron’s reporter, Doug Brown, who also planned to photograph the proceeding.
