Emmitt Martin is one of five fired officers charged over the fatal beating in 2023 that renewed calls for police reform.
A second former Memphis police officer has pleaded guilty to federal charges in the death of Black motorist Tyre Nichols, whose videotaped beating by five Black officers in January 2023 shocked the United States.
Emmitt Martin pleaded guilty to two of four federal counts against him – one for depriving Nichols’s civil rights and another for witness tampering – according to his plea agreement filed in a US district court in the state of Tennessee on Friday.
Sentencing has been set for December 5.
Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, who was in the courtroom on Friday, said the hearing was “very emotional” and “bittersweet”.
The latest plea was a step in the right direction, she said, but added that she will not be content until all of the officers are brought to justice. “Tyre was just coming home. He was just minding his own business,” Wells said.
Martin agreed to cooperate with the investigation, raising the possibility of him testifying against fellow former officers as he admitted to conspiring with the others to provide a misleading account of the beating.
“Driven by anger, Emmitt Martin used excessive force on Tyre Nichols on January 7, 2023. Driven by fear, he tried to cover it up,” defence lawyer Stephen Ross Johnson wrote in an email to the Reuters news agency.
“Today, in open court, he accepted responsibility for what he did,” according to Johnson, who declined to say whether Martin would testify against the others.
Martin is also expected to plead guilty to related Tennessee state charges, the Shelby County district attorney’s office said in a statement on Friday.
In November, another former Memphis police officer, Desmond Mills, pleaded guilty to federal charges and agreed to plead guilty to related Tennessee state charges. In exchange, Mills, who was facing life in prison, agreed to a 15-year sentence with state and federal prosecutors, the district attorney’s office said at the time.
Under Martin’s deal, federal prosecutors agreed to recommend a sentence of no more than 40 years.
Martin and Mills were among five officers who had previously pleaded not guilty to federal civil rights offences and state charges of second-degree murder.
The federal trial is scheduled to begin on September 9. The state trial is on hold while the federal case develops.
The killing led to protests across the country and again raised the debate about racism and police brutality in the US.
Nichols was stopped by police on January 7 for an alleged traffic violation and was aggressively pulled out of his car by officers. An officer shot at Nichols with a stun gun, but he ran away, towards his nearby home, according to video footage released by the city of Memphis and other police records.
Officers who were part of a crime-suppression team known as Scorpion caught up with Nichols and punched him, kicked him and slugged him with a baton as he shouted for his mother.
After the beating, officers stood by and talked with one another as Nichols struggled with his injuries while he was on the ground, video showed. One officer also took photos of Nichols as he was propped up against an unmarked police car, video and other records showed.
Nichols was taken to a hospital in an ambulance that left the site of the beating 27 minutes after emergency medical technicians arrived, authorities said.
Nichols, 29, died three days later with the autopsy attributing the cause to blunt force injuries to the head.
Police said Nichols had been suspected of reckless driving, but no verified evidence of a traffic violation has emerged in public documents or video footage.