A Georgia sheriff’s deputy won’t face criminal charges for fatally shooting a Black man during a 2023 traffic stop that spiraled into a violent struggle, the district attorney who examined body camera video and other evidence in the killing said Tuesday.
Leonard Cure, 53, was killed just three years after Florida authorities had freed him from prison after serving 16 years for a crime he did not commit.
Staff Sgt. Buck Aldridge, a White deputy in Camden County, Georgia, pulled Cure over for speeding on Interstate 95 near the Florida line on Oct. 16, 2023. Aldridge ordered Cure to get out of his pickup truck and shocked him with a stun gun when Cure refused to put his hands behind his back. Body and dash camera video showed Cure was fighting back and had a hand at Aldridge’s throat when he was shot point-blank.
“Use of deadly force at that point was objectively reasonable given that he was being overpowered at that time,” District Attorney Keith Higgins told The Associated Press in a phone interview Tuesday.
Attorneys Ben Crump and Harry Daniels, who are representing Cure’s family, have insisted Aldridge used excessive force.
Innocence Project of Florida via AP
“This decision is a devastating failure of justice, sending the message that law enforcement officers can take a life without consequence,” they said in a statement. “Leonard Cure was a man who had already fought so hard to reclaim his life after a wrongful conviction, only to have it stolen from him again. His family will not stop fighting for accountability, and neither will we.”
Cure had been exonerated in 2020 by the Broward State Attorney’s Office in Fort Lauderdale for a 2003 armed robbery of a drug store. He was the first person to be exonerated by the office’s conviction review unit.
The unit found that Cure had strong alibis and that the case against him lacked physical evidence or solid witnesses, CBS Miami reported.
“We are devastated by the death of Leonard Cure,” Broward State Attorney Harold F. Pryor said at the time of his death. “The Leonard we knew was a smart, funny and kind person.”
Seth Miller, the executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida, which worked on Cure’s wrongful conviction case, told CBS Miami after Cure’s death that he had recently bought his first home in Georgia.
“That’s where he was going,” Miller said.
Miller said individuals like Cure who have been wrongfully convicted often live in fear.
“That at any moment, the liberty that you work so hard to achieve after a wrongful incarceration can be taken away from you,” he told CBS Miami.
Deputy Dalton Vernakes, a spokesman for Camden County Sheriff James Kevin Chaney, confirmed Aldridge remains employed by the sheriff. Aldridge had been placed on administrative leave while Cure’s shooting was investigated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Vernakes said he did not immediately know whether Aldridge had returned to normal duties.
An attorney for Aldridge, Adrienne Browning, did not immediately return an email message seeking comment Tuesday.
Lawyers for Cure’s family have said the Camden County sheriff should never have hired Aldridge, who was fired by the neighboring Kingsland Police Department in 2017 after being disciplined a third time for using excessive force. Personnel records show the sheriff hired him nine months later.
A year ago, Cure’s family filed a federal lawsuit against Aldridge and then-Sheriff Jim Proctor in U.S. District Court, seeking $16 million. It accuses Aldridge of using excessive force and Proctor of ignoring the deputy’s history of violence. Both have denied wrongdoing in court filings. The case is still pending in U.S. District Court.
