Federal Trial of Former Antioch Police Officer Ends in Limited Split Verdict

Updated at 4:08 p.m.

A federal jury returned a split verdict against former Antioch police officer Morteza Amiri on Friday afternoon, finding him guilty of violating one person’s rights and falsifying a police report but acquitting him of a broader charge that he and other officers engaged in a systemic conspiracy to use excessive force repeatedly over a three-year period.

“Morteza Amiri violated the oath he swore to protect the people of Antioch,” said acting U.S. District Attorney Patrick D. Robbins in a statement. “As today’s jury verdict makes clear, officers who put themselves above the law will be held accountable.”

The case against Amiri stems from a police corruption scandal that became public in 2023 and implicated members of both the Antioch and Pittsburg police departments for exchanging violently racist text messages, falsifying college coursework to bump their pay and allegedly distributing steroids.

Amiri and two other former Antioch officers initially faced what may have been the most serious criminal charges to emerge in the case. But one officer took a plea deal, another case ended in a mistrial, and Amiri’s conviction was far more limited than the broad conspiracy prosecutors had set out to prove.

Amiri’s sentencing on the two guilty counts is set for June, according to his attorney, Paul Goyette. He said the jury “got it right” when it found Amiri not guilty of conspiracy.

Prosecutors had presented to the jury volumes of offensive text messages as evidence that Amiri and other officers were conspiring and encouraging one another to use excessive force. Goyette called those texts “trash talking” among numerous colleagues in a dangerous profession.

“What the text messages weren’t — they weren’t evidence of an agreement between Mr. Amiri and anybody to go out and violate anybody’s rights,” Goyette said.

Former Antioch officer Eric Rombough pleaded guilty shortly before the trial began, and he was a prominent witness in the prosecution’s case, as was another former Antioch and Pittsburg officer who pleaded guilty to charges in a separate federal case — Timothy Manly-Williams. The trial took a surprising turn two weeks ago when the judge declared a mistrial against Amiri’s co-defendant, Devon Christopher Wenger.

Rombough testified for the prosecution that he and Amiri encouraged each other to violently punish suspects. He testified that he lost respect for the civil rights of the people he was policing and felt “a huge sense of shame.”

The single use of force for which Amiri was convicted Friday of deprivation of rights and falsifying records came on July 24, 2019, when Manly-Williams was on a ride-along with Amiri, his roommate at the time. Amiri started a conflict with a man on a bicycle, and Manly-Williams released the police dog to maul the bicyclist.

Amiri texted colleagues that it was a “stretch” of a resisting arrest case, that he’d left information out of his official report and joked while referencing a “piece of the suspect’s flesh” hanging from the jaws of his K9.

The split verdict comes after about two days of jury deliberations, which started Wednesday. In closing arguments, the prosecution and defense presented two very different pictures of Amiri’s time at the Antioch Police Department.

The prosecution argued that Amiri showed a pattern of repeated excessive force, aided by his police K9, Purcy, and studded with celebrations of violent incidents in private text messages with other officers.

Goyette argued that the vulgar messages were cherry-picked to make his client look bad and depicted the “rough” way officers speak to each other in a stressful and desensitizing work environment. Goyette also attempted to discredit many of the prosecution’s witnesses, including people who were unhoused when they were arrested and had criminal records.

Amiri was convicted last year, along with five other officers, in a scheme to obtain fraudulent college degrees for a raise in pay.

Prosecutors have not indicated whether they will bring Wenger to trial again on civil rights charges. He still faces separate charges of illegally distributing steroids. A jury trial on the steroid charges is set for late April.

KQED’s Katie DeBenedetti contributed to this report.