A Buffalo, New York, officer who was terminated in 2008 after trying to stop a fellow policeman from putting a black man in a chokehold won access to her pension Tuesday after a yearslong fight.
The New York Supreme Court decided that former officer Cariol Horne will receive a pension equivalent to 20 years of work in law enforcement following the city’s passage of Cariol’s Law.
The law includes a provision that allows an officer who was retroactively “terminated for reporting the objectively unreasonable use of force against a civilian or intervening to stop the use of objectively unreasonable force by a fellow officer” to be allowed to contest the situation in court.
Judge Dennis Ward ruled that the city of Buffalo has “already determined that Officer Horne intervened to save the life of a civilian.” Therefore, her termination was null.
“Recent events in the national news, including the death last year in the City of Minneapolis of George Floyd, who died from unreasonable physical force being applied for over nine minutes, have sparked national outrage over the use of his practice,” Ward wrote. “One of the issues in all of these cases is the role of other officers at the scene and particularly their complicity in failing to intervene to save the life of a person to whom such unreasonable physical force is being applied.”
The judge added: “Officer Horne did not merely stand by, but instead sought to intervene, despite the penalty she ultimately paid for doing so,” saying that the city made an “error” in firing her.
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“Quoting the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ‘the time is always right to do right,'” Ward wrote. “The city of Buffalo has recognized the error and has acknowledged the need to undo an injustice from the past. The legal system can at the very least be a mechanism to help justice prevail, even if belatedly.”
In November 2006, Horne physically intervened in an attempt to stop Officer Gregory Kwiatkowski from putting Neal Mack, a black man who was in handcuffs, into a chokehold. A year later, the department filed a complaint against her, and she was terminated following a series of hearings that concluded in 2008.
Horne was seen at 2020 Black Lives Matter rallies following the death of George Floyd. The former officer spoke about race relations and how white people should focus their “attention” on people of color.
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“Black people scream about it all day, every day, and you have white people, who are sympathetic to our calling, to say, ‘Yea, all lives matter, but black lives are the ones being brutalized right now.’ So we need attention on black lives,” Horne said in June 2020. “So when white people understand that and want to jump in on the movement, it’s like, come on.”
