A little more than a year after the shooting that struck the New York Police Department, a Queens court concluded the trial of the murder of Agent Jonathan Diller, who died during a road check in March 2024. The judgment, which arrived on Monday at the New York Supreme Court, closes the first degree of a trial followed carefully by the institutions and police unions.
Judge Michael Aloise sentenced Guy Rivera, 36 years old, to a total sentence of 115 years in prison, stating that the different convictions – coarse murder aggravated, attempted murder and illegal possession of weapon – are consecutively discounted. This, in the U.S. judicial system, is equivalent to lifeless detention.
The reconstruction of the facts, which emerged during the three weeks of trial, concerns a check in the Far Rockaway neighborhood, Queens. Diller, 31, had approached a car with his colleague, Sergeant Sasha Rosen. According to the accusation, Rivera had in her pocket an object in the form of “L” compatible with a weapon. When the agents ordered him out of the vehicle and Rosen tried to pull him out, the shot that killed Diller started. The prosecutors argued that the defendant then tried to shoot the sergeant, without being able to do so because of a gun failure.
The jury had already issued the verdict at the beginning of April, recognizing Rivera guilty of four counts but acquitting the defendant from the most serious accusation, that of first-degree voluntary murder. In order to arrive at that sentence, the jurors would have had to establish their intention to kill: an element which they did not consider to be beyond any reasonable doubt. However, they have established that Rivera has pressed the trigger voluntarily, excluding the defense argument that the blow would accidentally leave during the colluctation.
One of the most controversial points of the process concerns the physical conditions of the defendant during the arrest: the defense claimed that Rivera had a fractured arm and that it would affect the dynamics of the gun and the possibility of further action. The judge did not admit in court a video that, according to the lawyers, would support this reconstruction. The video will probably be central in the appeal, already announced by the defense represented by a legal officer of the Legal Aid Society.
In the courtroom, at the time of the sentence, there were more than 200 people, mostly NYPD agents. Among them also the victim’s wife, Stephanie Diller, who read a statement directly addressed to the defendant, describing the impact of the loss on his family nucleus and the couple’s son, today three years old. After the decision, the district attorney of Queens, Melinda Katz, and the representatives of the department expressed satisfaction with the outcome of the sentence.
L’articolo 115 years old to the man who killed a police officer in 2024 proviene da IlNewyorkese.
