California officer sentenced for shooting mentally ill man

A California police officer was sentenced Friday to six years in prison for fatally shooting an unarmed mentally ill man nine times as the man drove slowly away from police in a wealthy San Francisco suburb.

Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Terri Mockler said evidence showed that 33-year-old Laudemer Arboleda was driving 6 miles per hour as Danville police officer Andrew Hall fired a barrage of bullets into him that violated his own training and put fellow officers in danger.

Hall made an “extremely poor choice," the judge said, and Arboleda did not deserve to die for evading an officer.

“While he may have violated the law it was no law that carried a sentence of death for him," the judge said.

A jury convicted Hall in October of assault with a firearm for the shooting of Arboleda, but jurors deadlocked on another and more serious count of voluntary manslaughter.

The case marked the first time a police officer was charged in an on-duty shooting in Contra Costa County, east of San Francisco, and is part of a push by more prosecutors to punish police misconduct after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis set off nationwide calls for social justice.