photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World
The Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center is pictured on Sept. 4, 2024.
As bars were closing one night last November, two strangers collided on a downtown Lawrence sidewalk. The Douglas County District Attorney’s Office says that what came next was a string of crimes, but on Tuesday a jury quickly disagreed — after deliberating for less than two hours.
The DA’s Office, represented by prosecutors Madeline Bjorklun and Jenna Phelps, had charged the defendant in the case, Abd Alaziz Basim Al Ani, with assault, battery on a police officer and interference with law enforcement, while Al Ani’s defense attorneys maintained to the jury that he was simply the victim of sloppy police work and an unreliable, perhaps ill-intentioned, group of male college students.
“What happened to Mr. Al Ani is wrong,” his attorney Gary West told the jury Tuesday. “Just plain and simply wrong.”
photo by: Journal-World File
Lawrence Attorney Gary West
The criminal charges stemmed from an encounter on the night of Nov. 25, 2023, near 10th and Massachusetts streets, when Al Ani, 37, and a young man, who was with a group of four other young men, ran into each other on the sidewalk as they were all walking. In the state’s version of events, Al Ani and the men then went their separate ways, but Al Ani returned with an ice scraper in his sleeve and swung at the man he had collided with, though he did not make contact. That man, in self-defense, then punched Al Ani several times, injuring his head.
The group of men then alerted police in the area to the confrontation as Al Ani walked away up Massachusetts Street.
A Lawrence police officer, Corp. Jared Hedge, having heard a radio report of what he believed to be a disturbance with a weapon, caught up with Al Ani to investigate. During a brief encounter — lasting only about 30 seconds, as the defense pointed out — Hedge approached Al Ani, who told Hedge several times to “shoot me.” Hedge said he wasn’t going to shoot and asked Al Ani if he was armed. Al Ani, his hands extended outward from his sides, said, “What do you think?”
Despite speaking English in the police body camera footage, during the trial Al Ani had a interpreter by his side to translate the court proceedings into Arabic. Al Ani did not take the stand to testify in his own defense.
As seen on body cam video played in court, Hedge reached out to touch Al Ani, who grabbed Hedge’s hand and twisted it, resulting in a small cut on Hedge’s finger, variously described as a “laceration” or a “scratch.” Other officers in the area quickly responded and took Al Ani to the ground and handcuffed him.
Prosecutors told the jury that an injury does not have to be serious to qualify as battery under the law.
The defense, represented by West and Allyson Monson, put on evidence that the police did not check security camera footage in the area — either from multiple business cameras or from a 360-degree public safety camera across the street — to determine what actually happened between the group of men on the sidewalk; nor did police question possible eyewitnesses in the area, one of whom reportedly said, “They instigated this” — “they” meaning, West told the jury during closing arguments, the “white college kids.”
West also criticized police for allowing the confrontation to escalate to a takedown and handcuffing in less than 30 seconds. He said that Al Ani had just been “cold-cocked” by the man he ran into and that he was suffering from the head wound, as evidenced by his “shoot me” comments.
Jurors saw a photo of Al Ani taken later at the jail that showed injuries and blood on the left side of his head.
West told the jury that Al Ani had substantially complied with Hedge’s orders during the encounter.
Hedge, however, had testified that he did not believe Al Ani had complied with his orders to put his hands behind his back and to answer whether he was armed, and Hedge believed he may have had a weapon because of the radio report, which he said explained the quick escalation. He told the jury that he needed to get the situation contained as quickly as possible for safety reasons.
West also noted that of the several police officers involved in the incident, none seemed to be actually in charge of the investigation, and he said police did not separate the five young men when they were interviewing them, which he said was standard procedure for interviewing witnesses to prevent them from contaminating each other’s accounts of what happened.
The jury saw body camera footage of the men being interviewed as a group by police on the sidewalk, where multiple people were talking at once.
When asked on the stand why the witnesses weren’t separated, Officer Andrew Haar indicated that he was trying to get information quickly because it was late and “cold” outside — a statement that West later emphasized to the jury as being contrary to good police procedure, noting that the officers all had heated patrol cars.
Prosecutors told jurors that the police body camera footage that the jury did see spoke for itself and that no other footage was necessary to reach guilty verdicts. They also emphasized that Al Ani returned to the group of men with an ice scraper after the collision and that the ice scraper was later found on the sidewalk.
West, however, questioned the credibility of the young man who had run into Al Ani, saying he had variously described the run-in as a “bodycheck,” being “bumped into” and, later, “I might have been in his way,” as the young man was evidently walking backward.
“He embellishes,” West told the jury, suggesting that everything the young man said about the incident should be received with skepticism, including his claim that Al Ani put him in reasonable fear of immediate bodily harm.
Though the case might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of criminal justice, West told the jurors that it was just as important as “anything you’d see on ’20/20′ or ’48 Hours.’”
“It’s about justice,” he said, “with a capital J.”
After the three not-guilty verdicts were read, Al Ani broke into a big smile and thanked his legal team.
The case represents the third jury acquittal for the Douglas County DA’s Office in less than three weeks.
