Court Orders New Trials in Elijah McClain's Death

A Colorado court reversed homicide convictions against two paramedics on Thursday in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a Black man who was pinned down by police and injected with a fatal dose of ketamine. The appeals court ordered new trials for Aurora Fire Rescue paramedics Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec, the AP reports. McClain, 23, had been forcibly restrained and put in a neck hold by police, who stopped him in response to a suspicious person complaint as the massage therapist walked home from a convenience store in the Denver suburb in 2019. McClain's final words—"I can't breathe"—foreshadowed those of George Floyd a year later in Minneapolis, and the Colorado man's name became part of the rallying cries for social justice that swept the US in 2020.

Criminal charges against paramedics and emergency medical technicians involved in police custody cases are rare. As McClain's death and others raised questions about the use of ketamine to subdue struggling suspects, the Colorado prosecution sent shock waves through the ranks of first responders across the US. A jury in 2023 found Cooper and Cichuniec guilty of criminally negligent homicide following a weekslong trial in state district court. The jurors also found Cichuniec guilty of second-degree felony assault. Cichuniec received five years in prison. Cooper avoided prison and was sentenced to 14 months in jail with work release and probation.

The appeals court upheld Cichuniec's assault conviction but faulted the instructions given to jurors with respect to the criminally negligent homicide charges before they deliberated. Thursday's ruling sends their cases back to a lower court for a new trial on that charge. Cichuniec was released early from prison in 2024 after a judge reduced his sentence to four years' probation. That judge, Mark Warner, cited "unusual and extenuating circumstances," a part of Colorado's mandatory sentencing law that allows a court to modify a sentence after a defendant has served at least 119 days in prison. Warner said that Cichuniec had to make a quick decision the night of the arrest as the highest-ranking paramedic at the scene.