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“This has been a heartbreaking case,” Judge Joseph Marx said in sentencing the former officer, Nouman K. 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, 41, 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.
In asking the judge to hand down the maximum sentence, Adrienne Ellis, the chief assistant state’s attorney, said that Jones, 31, “had done nothing wrong that night.”
“He did everything right, and yet, he still lost his life,” she said. “Corey essentially begged the defendant not to kill him.”
Richard G. Lubin, who oversaw Raja’s defense team, asked the judge to sentence Raja only on the manslaughter count and not on the attempted first-degree murder charge.
He said that it was difficult for his client to receive a fair trial, because people “have stoked the narrative that this is another case about a white cop murdering a black man.”
“He doesn’t have a prejudiced bone in his body,” Lubin said of Raja, who is of Asian descent. “He himself has had a lifetime of suffering prejudice because of his race.”
Lawyers for Raja are likely to appeal the decision.
Before the judge announced his decision, Raja’s wife, Karine Raja, pleaded for leniency, pointing to the support that she would need from her husband to care for the couple’s two children.
“Why I’m so angry is that the wrong person was chosen as the sacrificial lamb,” she said. “Raja is the man you wanted serving and protecting you.”
After leaving the courthouse Thursday afternoon, family members and friends of Jones held hands and sang the spiritual song “Victory is Mine.”
“This is a milestone in black America,” said Benjamin L. Crump, one of the lawyers for Jones’ family.
“It is a footnote in American jurisprudence,” he continued. “But based on the fact that this is the first time in over 30 years that a police officer has been convicted of killing a black person in the state of Florida, it is a milestone for many black Americans, not only in Florida but all across the United States.”
According to the Miami Herald, the last time an officer was sentenced for an on-duty killing in Florida was 1989.
The 2015 killing of Jones, a church band member without a criminal record, became a flashpoint in a string of contentious shootings of black men by 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 removes the obligation to retreat if a person feels threatened and frees the person to use deadly force “if he or she reasonably believes” it is necessary “to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm.”
On the night of Oct. 18, 2015, Jones was on the side of an Interstate 95 exit ramp in Palm Beach County about 3:15 a.m. waiting for a tow truck when Raja, an officer with the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department who was on duty in plainclothes, approached Jones’ SUV in an unmarked van.
According to prosecutors, Raja did not identify himself as a police officer.
The Police Department initially said Jones had “confronted” Raja, who then fired his weapon. Jones had a legally purchased handgun with him, which Raja had claimed that Jones pointed at him.
Within moments of approaching Jones, Raja fired six shots and struck Jones three times, killing him.
It was later discovered that the interaction between the two men had been recorded on a phone line after Jones called for roadside assistance. Prosecutors said that Jones was heard calmly speaking to the tow-truck dispatcher and to Raja.
The audio recording, in which gunshots could be heard, was played repeatedly for the jury.
Raja was fired by the Police Department within a month of the killing, and was charged in June 2016.
This week, C.J. Jones, Jones’ older brother, told a local news station, CBS 12, 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,” C.J. 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.