Behind Bars! Ex-newark Police Officer Gets 27-year Sentence for Deadly Chase

A former New Jersey police officer has been sentenced to 27 years in jail for fatally shooting one man and wounding another during a high-speed automobile chase in Newark 5 1/2 years ago.

Superior Court Judge Michael Ravin sentenced former Newark officer Jovanny Crespo to 20 years for aggravated manslaughter and seven years for aggravated assault in the January 2019 chase, citing the need to deter officers from what he called a “shoot-first, ask-questions-later” mentality, according to NJ.com.

Those sentences will run consecutively, while the judge handed six-year terms for official misconduct, which will run concurrently with the other penalties. According to NJ.com, as the court informed Crespo, 31, that he would not be eligible for parole for 22 years and 11 months, he slumped back into his chair, and members of his family cried.

Earlier, Crespo wailed as his mother and sister begged for mercy. He later stood to offer a quick apology to the victims’ families.

Dashboard and police body camera footage from the chase shows Crespo leaping out of his patrol car and firing three times during the chase. Essex County prosecutors stated that state standards allow for deadly action only when the officer or someone else is in “imminent danger” of death or serious bodily damage.

Defense counsel Isaac Wright Jr. had requested leniency, saying the judge that Crespo had less than two years on the job and was inadequately taught and that superiors should have called off the January 2019 hunt. Prosecutors claimed he had spent more than six months training at the police academy and had been taught how to use deadly force properly.

Ravin concurred, calling the defendant “extensively trained” and describing the five-minute chase through Newark that resulted in the murder of 46-year-old driver Gregory Griffin and the gravely injured passenger as “an abhorrent abuse of police power.”