SAN JOSE — For the rest of his life, a 24-year-old African-American motivational speaker who was convicted Monday of resisting arrest will be branded as a criminal for refusing to step away from police officers while they were trying to give his friend a ticket.

But what the record won’t include is that at least half the jurors who convicted him also believed Nate Howard was the victim of police brutality.

“I feel sorry for Mr. Howard,” said one female juror who nonetheless found him guilty of the misdemeanor. “He was just worried about his (black) friend, and rightfully so, because things do happen.”

The verdict comes at a time of heightened sensitivity to the treatment of blacks and other racial minorities by police. Protests have erupted in the past year and a half in the wake of fatal encounters between black men and police in Ferguson, Missouri; Staten Island, New York; and Baltimore.

Part of Howard’s run-in with law enforcement was caught on a cellphone video. The clip showed him being struck by a police baton and body-slammed to the ground.

Howard’s run-in with police unfolded on an early morning in May 2014. Howard, now 24, was visiting San Jose from San Diego to give a commencement speech at a graduation ceremony for black students at San Jose State. After the ceremony, Howard and a close friend with whom he was staying joined about 10 students at a party at a downtown club.

As the bars were closing and the group was leaving, a close friend of Howard’s asked the bouncer to let him back into the club so he could use the bathroom. The bouncer wouldn’t allow him in, so the friend urinated in a deserted area behind a building while the rest of the group waited down the street.

Police officers saw the friend and walked him over to a patrol car, ordering him to place his hands on the hood while they wrote him a ticket. One of the cops assured the group that the man would be released, but it is unclear whether Howard heard him.

Howard said in an interview outside court last week he believes the officers would have let his friend off with a warning if he had been white, and testified to similar concerns about racial disparity in court. Worried about his friend’s safety, as well as where he would stay if his friend were arrested, Howard approached the group of several officers to find out what was going on.

According to prosecutor Traci Mason, officers asked Howard at least six times to step away from them as he stated repeatedly he was a graduate of the University of Southern California and knew his rights. But he refused, endangering their effort to control the crowded streets, Mason told the jury, justifying the use of force by Officer Allan De La Cruz, who picked Howard up and threw him to the ground, and by Sgt. Amir Khalighi, who struck him at least twice with a baton.

No criminal charges will be brought against the officers, and the San Jose Police Department does not comment on the outcome of any specific internal investigations into the use of force.

The jury gasped last week as they watched the video of the body-slamming in court. Even De La Cruz testified during the three-day trial that the encounter “was more violent than I intended,” though he still defended his actions.

Howard’s lawyer, Jaime Leanos, told the jury that Howard, who is about 5-feet, 7-inches tall and slim, never represented a threat.

Last Wednesday, a juror was excused after telling the court outside the presence of the rest of the jury that he had worked downtown as a bouncer for years and recognized Khalighi when the sergeant took the stand. The juror said he did not have a good impression of the sergeant because he thought Khalighi often escalated touchy situations and made them “worse.”

Late Friday, the jury submitted a question to the judge, asking if Howard could be found guilty if the jury believed that the officers had used excessive force. The juror who spoke after the trial said most of the panel at that point did not believe that either Howard or the police were “100 percent blameless.”

Half the jurors, she said, weren’t sure if it was appropriate to convict Howard, because they thought the officers had overreacted and failed to show restraint.

But Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Matthew S. Harris on Monday ruled that the officers’ actions wouldn’t excuse Howard’s behavior as long as the jury found that Howard had broken the law before the police responded. The judge also cited a case showing that a criminal conviction for resisting arrest does not preclude the defendant from suing the police in civil court for excessive force.

De La Cruz was previously found civilly liable for excessive force in a 2009 incident in which a man he stopped for riding a bicycle without a headlight had his elbow dislocated and nose broken. The man was never charged with a crime.

The jury returned the guilty verdict Monday after deliberating for less than six hours beginning Friday afternoon. The judge waived Howard’s appearance, so he was not in court as the verdict was read.

Howard now faces a sentence ranging from probation to a year in county jail. Mason said she will request that the judge sentence Howard to an unspecified number of “weekend work” days, picking up trash from the freeway. He is set to be sentenced Friday.

In a telephone interview, Howard said he was “hurt” by the verdict, but vowed to continue fighting police misconduct as a “leader of his generation.”

“For the record, I’m not against police,” he said, reiterating that his godfather is the police chief in the San Diego County city of La Mesa. “I’m against police brutality.”

Contact Tracey Kaplan at 408-278-3482. Follow her at Twitter.com @tkaplanreport.