The officer, Cariol Horne, was fired after an incident in 2006 in which she tried to stop an officer from using a stranglehold on a handcuffed suspect. Horne served 19 of the twenty years in the Buffalo Police Force to receive pensions.
‘I had five children and I lost everything [the suspect] did not lose his life, “Horne said.” So if I have nothing else to live for in life, I can at least know that I did the right thing and that [he] still breathing. ‘
Tuesday’s ruling restored Horne’s pension and evacuated an earlier court ruling confirming her dismissal.
She added: “If not everyone is justified, I am not justified,” she said she would continue to pursue accountability in police departments.
CNN reached the city on Wednesday, but received no immediate response. Buffalo News spokesman Michael J. DeGeorge told Buffalo News: “The city has always supported any additional judicial review available to Officer Horne and respects the court’s ruling.”
Neither the Buffalo Police Department nor the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association responded immediately to a request for comment.
“The justice system can at least be the mechanism for enforcing justice, even if it is too late,” Judge Dennis E. Ward, Erie High Court, wrote in his ruling.
“One of the issues in all of these cases is the role of other officers on the scene, and especially their complicity in not intervening to save the life of a person to whom such unreasonable physical force is being applied,” Ward said. writing.
Ward refers to Buffalo lawmakers drafting a law requiring police officers to intervene in cases of excessive violence and naming the legislation after Horne. Thus, Ward writes, the city has already determined that Officer Horne intervened to save the life of a citizen.
Horne addressed the court ruling in a statement issued by her attorney.
“My justification costs 15 years, but what was achieved could not be measured,” she said. “I never wanted to go through another police officer I went through to do the right thing.”
She called on lawmakers nationwide to pass similar legislation to Buffalo’s ‘Cariol’s Law,’ which compels officers to intervene and seeks to legally protect those who do so.
Horne told Lemon that the law would punish an officer if they did not intervene ‘and that for officers:’ If you feel you are going to break the law, you will not break it, or at least you should not break it not. ‘
CNN’s Sheena Jones contributed to this report.