Federal hate-crime charges against former New Jersey police chief Frank Nucera Jr. were dropped Tuesday after the judge declared a mistrial. The judge’s decision to toss out the charges comes after two trials yielded deadlocked juries, as reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer. With the charges dropped, the former cop won’t face a third trial. The Bordentown chief was federally charged with hate crimes and “deprivation of civil rights” for allegedly slamming the head of a Black teen—who was suspected of swimming in a hotel pool without being a guest there—into a door, per the Inquirer. Nucera was allegedly heard in a recording calling him a “fucking, little, fucking n-----.” If Nucera had been found guilty, he could have been sentenced to a decade behind bars. Instead, the disgraced officer faces 28 months in prison for a single charge, lying to the FBI, for which he was successfully convicted in his first trial.
Read it at The Philadelphia Inquirer
