Metro Nashville Police Officer Andrew Delke is back in court today for the third in a series of hearings leading up to his murder trial next month. His attorney has called multiple witnesses and introduced new evidence to try to prove his shooting of Daniel Hambrick in 2018 was justified.
WPLN’s Samantha Max has been following the proceedings. She says they’ve focused on two issues that are likely to play a central role at trial: whether Delke had the right to shoot and a missing piece of surveillance footage. She sat down with Morning Edition host Nina Cardona to discuss the latest news from court.
More: Learn more about the case in our podcast, Deadly Force
Nina Cardona: These have been some pretty lengthy hearings with another full day in store today. Why are these proceedings happening so close to what’s likely to be a long trial?
Samantha Max: The defense team is essentially asking permission from the court to present and suppress certain evidence and to question certain witnesses at trial. So part of that is submitting things like videos and photos and documents that they want to either show jurors or have jurors not see. But they’re also interviewing so-called expert witnesses who would provide testimony that they think could help prove their case. For instance, an engineer who can look at videos of a car traveling and calculate speed and a retired MNPD officer who now works as a private crime scene investigator.
It seems the defense is trying to prove through this witness that Delke had a reason to follow the white sedan, because it was driving far over the speed limit. But, it's important to note that Delke started following the car before it was speeding.
— Samantha Max (@samanthaellimax) June 4, 2021
Cardona: One person who took the stand has raised a bit more controversy. Why are people taking issue with the characterization of former district attorney as an expert witness, and what role could he play in this trial?
Max: [Torry] Johnson was the top prosecutor in town for nearly three decades and is now a professor at Belmont University Law School. So he’s definitely a well-known entity in the local legal world. And he’s recently come under some scrutiny for defending the murder conviction of a man even after his investigators found holes in his case.
Cardona: Well, what role could he play in this trial?
Max: Officer Delke’s defense team wants to bring him in as an expert on the Fourth Amendment — in other words, whether Delke violated Daniel Hambrick’s constitutional rights by following him first in a car and then on foot. Prosecutors are saying that Delke overstepped and that he didn’t have enough information to believe that Hambrick was breaking the law. But Johnson disagrees. He says police have special rights to follow people, even if they’re just suspicious that someone is breaking the rules, and that Delke was within his rights both when he decided to pursue and when he decided to shoot. And assistant district attorney Ronald Dowdy had some pretty choice words for Johnson and his decision to go against his former officer’s prosecution of Daniel Hambrick’s killer.
Dowdy: “So, Mr. Johnson, what you are saying is that if this case had happened under your watch, Daniel Hambrick would have been just another young, dead Black man?”
Johnson: “I don’t believe I testified to that.”
Dowdy: “I’ll ask you again. Yes or no?”
Johnson: “I can’t answer that question. Alright? I have not testified to that. I didn’t say that. Those are your characterizations, not mine.”
Cardona: Oh man, that was a pretty tense exchange.
Max: Yeah, one of many throughout these hearings. Delke’s defense attorney has also been pretty fired up during these proceedings.
Cardona: Well, let’s talk about another intense back-and-forth from the hearings. Several witnesses have said there are cameras that could have captured about two missing seconds of the foot chase that we don’t have. Is there any video from those cameras?
Max: No. One camera that could have captured those moments was broken. A camera technician says it was struck by lightning a couple of months before the shooting. And then there’s a different camera that might have been functioning. But state agents investigating the shooting never got footage from it. TBI agent Steven Kennard said he asked the camera technician to isolate the footage that he thought was relevant to the shooting and he didn’t bother to watch or get copies of anything else. Defense attorney David Raybin thought that was a big mistake and one that could have grave consequences for his client.
Pole 27, camera 3 has played a central role in this hearing and is coming up again now. Defense asks if the camera is pointing toward the void area. Kennard says yes. "Did you recover video from that camera at any time?" defense asks. Kennard says no.
— Samantha Max (@samanthaellimax) June 7, 2021
Raybin: “You’ve known from not only this case but other cases historically in the last couple of years that video is critical in these kinds of cases. True?”
Kennard: “It can be, certainly.”
Raybin: “It can be? It is! Is it not?”
Kennard: “Yes.”
Raybin: “So, why in the world would you not want to capture every scrap of video that existed so there’d by no question about it something came up later?”
Cardona: So why does Raybin place so much importance on this particular piece of video?
Max: Well, Officer Delke told Kennard, during an interview two days after the shooting, that Hambrick pointed a gun at him and that’s why he shot. We don’t see that at any point in the various video clips that we have, but there’s about 36 feet of the chase — “the void space,” as it’s been called — that we don’t have footage of. Raybin is trying to say that Hambrick could have pointed his gun at Delke then. And his job, of course, is to prove that Delke was just doing his job as a police officer when he shot and killed Daniel Hambrick, not committing murder.
Samantha Max is WPLN’s criminal justice reporter and host of the Deadly Force podcast, which digs into the details of this case. You can subscribe on any podcasting app. We’ll be updating that feed with Samantha’s coverage of the case, including this conversation and at wpln.org.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM