“This has been a heartbreaking case,” Judge Joseph Marx said in sentencing the former officer, Nouman Raja, for the two counts a jury found him guilty of last month: manslaughter by culpable negligence and attempted first-degree murder with a firearm.
Raja, who had faced a maximum penalty of life in prison in the fatal shooting of Corey Jones, received a 25-year term for each count. The sentences will be served concurrently.
“This is a milestone in black America,” Benjamin Crump, one of the lawyers for Jones’ family, told reporters in front of the courthouse in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Thursday afternoon.
Richard Lubin, who oversees Raja’s defense team, could not be immediately reached for comment.
The 2015 killing of Jones, 31, a church band member without a criminal record, became a flashpoint in a string of contentious shootings of black men by the police.
The encounter also highlighted Florida’s so-called Stand Your Ground law, which Raja’s lawyer had cited in his defense.
The Stand Your Ground law drew controversy in 2012 after George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager. Zimmerman was eventually acquitted, and the law ultimately did not figure into the defense strategy pursued by his legal team.
On Oct. 18, 2015, Jones was on the side of an Interstate 95 exit ramp in Palm Beach County at about 3:15 a.m. waiting for a tow truck when Raja, who worked for the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department and was on duty in plainclothes, approached Jones’ SUV in an unmarked van.
The Police Department said Jones had “confronted” Raja, who then fired his weapon.
Jones had a legally purchased handgun with him. Raja has claimed that Jones pointed it at him, but prosecutors say Raja fired shots even as Jones fled. Within moments of approaching Jones, Raja fired six shots and struck Jones three times, killing him.
The gun Jones had bought three days earlier was found on the ground, the police said.
The interaction was recorded on the phone line after Jones had called for roadside assistance. The audio recording, in which gunshots could be heard, was played repeatedly for the jury.
C.J. Jones, Jones’ older brother, told the local CBS station, CBS 12, this week that he blamed himself for not getting out of bed to help his brother when he called that night shortly before 3 a.m.
“It’s hard,” he said. “It’s really hard.”
“I never had a fight with him,”Jones said. “We never had to argue about nothing. It was the best feeling to have a brother like that because he looked up to me, he listened to me, he lived his life.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.