A federal judge on Thursday granted three former Memphis Police Department officers convicted for their roles in the death of Tyre Nichols a new trial due to concerns about judicial bias.
Nichols’s death while in MPD custody in Tennessee sparked nationwide protests and calls for police reform in 2023 due to accusations that he was unfairly targeted and treated by law enforcement during a traffic stop.
The case took a new turn this week when Chief United States District Judge Sheryl Lipman granted Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, and Justin Smith a new trial because of concerns that Judge Mark Norris, who oversaw the previous trial in which the three men were convicted last October, was biased against the officers and the MPD.
Norris recused himself from the case days before the officers’ sentencing, leading Lipman to take over proceedings in June.
Lipman said she believed Norris made rulings that were “sound, fair, and grounded firmly in the law.” However, “the appearance of judicial bias against the MPD created “an unconstitutional probability of bias” requiring a new trial, she wrote.
“Justice must not only be done but must manifestly be seen to be done,” she said in the ruling, arguing that the perception of bias could undermine public confidence in the verdict.
The concerns about the appearance of bias against the MPD stem from an incident involving one of Norris’s law clerks who had assisted the judge during the Nichols trial. After the clerk was attacked in a separate shooting, Norris met with federal prosecutors and an FBI special agent about the incident, and alleged during that encounter that “at least one” of the MPD officers charged in the Nichols case was also involved in targeting his clerk.
During the May 2025 meeting, the judge also said that the MPD was “infiltrated to the top with gang members,” an assistant U.S. attorney present at the meeting said, according to court documents.
Lipman concluded that Norris’s comments created a perception of bias against the MPD that “is too high to be constitutionally tolerable.”
Lawyers for the men said there was no evidence in the Nichols trial that linked the officers to a gang and that Norris could only have arrived at that opinion if he had a bias against the MPD.
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“Smith [one of the defendants granted a new trial Thursday] asserts that ‘[t]here was not one suggestion or one hint in the federal discovery process or the federal trial that any defendant or any member of the Memphis Police Department was in any way affiliated with an illegal street gang either through membership or relationship, nor was there any suggestion in discovery or at trial that members of the law enforcement agency would support or direct a criminal act such as attempted murder upon a member of the trial judge’s staff’” the motion reads.
“Smith asserts that concluding that one or more of the Defendants was affiliated with a street gang, or that the MPD was infiltrated to the top with gang members, would not be the sort of opinion that Judge Norris could have arrived at based on the evidence presented at trial and instead reflects a ‘deep[-seated] bias against the defendants and the Memphis Police Department,’” the documents continue.
