The Wisconsin Cop Who Shot an Unarmed Biracial Man in March Won't Be Charged

Video via Fox11

On Tuesday in Madison, Wisconsin, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne announced that Officer Matt Kenny will not face criminal charges for shooting and killing an unarmed biracial man named Tony Robinson on March 6. At a news conference, Ozanne, who is the first black district attorney in Wisconsin history, said that Robinson's death "was the result of a lawful use of deadly police force." The shooting led to nonviolent protests in Madison.

On the evening of March 6, Robinson was seen acting erratically in public, according to three people who called 9-1-1. Their accounts suggested he accosted one stranger, and even tried to strangle another inside an apartment. Officer Matt Kenny arrived, later claiming that there was a physical confrontation in the apartment stairway, at which point Kenny fired seven shots. Robinson, who was 19, was taken to the hospital, where he died from his injuries.

According to the coroner's report, Robinson had recently been on mushrooms, marijuana, and Xanax. According to one of the people who called 9-1-1—an acquaintance who referred to Robinson as "Tony"—the 19-year-old was "tweaking" before he was shot.

This was just one in a recent explosion of controversies over the killing of unarmed black men by police officers. And Robinson's death came just five days after the March 1 killing of a homeless black man nicknamed "Africa" on LA's skid row. In Madison, the site of the killing was only about a mile from Wisconsin's state capitol building, leading to a large demonstration around the building's rotunda.

Shortly after the shooting, it emerged that Officer Kenny had previously been involved in the shooting of a man who was pointing a pellet gun at him. The incident was ruled "suicide by cop," and Kenny was given a medal.

Along with the report of Kenny's prior shooting, Madison police also released released a stack of documents on Kenny and Robinson. During his life, Robinson had multiple run-ins with the police, and in one of them, an officer kicked him in the chest.

"I'm not surprised. I could tell what the verdict was with all the evidence he was releasing," a local activist named Corinda Rainey-Moore told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "Unfortunately I think it is going to send the message that young African-American men are invisible, that they don't matter, that they can be shot seven times and it won't matter."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.