After Philando Castile was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights nearly a year and a half ago, it seemed like nearly everyone wanted to weigh in on what should happen next.

Calls for the officer to be charged came swiftly. Many in the community believed St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez recklessly killed the 32-year-old black man while Castile’s girlfriend and her 4-year-old child looked on.

Others came to the defense of Yanez and other police officers tasked with making split-second, life-and-death decisions.

Their opinions weren’t the ones that counted, though. The decision rested with Ramsey County Attorney John Choi.

In November of last year, Choi made history when he became the first county attorney in Minnesota’s modern history to bring criminal charges against a police officer involved in an on-duty fatal shooting.

Choi charged Yanez with one count of second-degree manslaughter and two counts of dangerous discharge of a firearm for endangering the lives of Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and Reynolds’ daughter.

Reynolds live-streamed the shooting’s immediate aftermath on Facebook, capturing worldwide attention when the footage when viral.

In June, a Ramsey County District Court jury acquitted Yanez on all the charges after the officer testified that he saw Castile gripping a gun despite commands not to do so.

A national dialogue about police use-of-force, particularly against people of color, continues.

Twin Cities residents are awaiting Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman’s decision on an officer-involved fatal shooting of an unarmed Minneapolis woman last July.

Just this Friday, Choi declined to charge officers involved in the fatal shooting of Cordale Handy, a black man, in St. Paul last March.

Choi agreed to an interview with the Pioneer Press to reflect on how and why he arrived at charges in the Castile shooting — a case he knows will define his career.

The following is that interview, conducted Thursday. It’s been edited for brevity and clarity.

Let’s go back to July 6, 2016, shortly after then-St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez fatally shot Philando Castile during that traffic stop. It happened in Falcon Heights, your jurisdiction, so the decision about whether Yanez crossed a line criminally belonged to you. When did you start to feel the weight of it all?

I remember that night I stayed at work late, just kind of thinking about what I would say to the public, and we came to the conclusion that it was important for me to say something, to tell the community, you know, I got this, I am the person that will be responsible, I will figure these issues out.

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‘Suspicious’ fire in Brooklyn Center destroys home’s garage, large Trump election sign I am blessed with the ability to kind of compartmentalize my life and … I sleep like a baby, even during the toughest times. But that weekend, I didn’t sleep so well, and I remember thinking to myself, “Is this really happening here in Ramsey County?” Because at that time, Reynolds’ Facebook Live video had gone worldwide and there was just so much media and public attention and anger about what had happened. Because when you see Philando Castile dying right in front of our eyes, of course the reaction is just pure sadness and regret and anger about why this had to happen.

So that’s when I started to recognize that this would be a case that would be defining for me from a professional standpoint, defining for our community, and something where the whole world is going to be paying attention. So you can imagine the thoughts and feelings I was having. I had to put my game face on and get ready for what I needed to do, which was to be strong and make sure I fought hard for the integrity of this process.

The state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension spent about three months investigating the case, and your office got it in late September. Why does the process take so long, especially when other cases are charged in a couple of days?

Well, the first thing to recognize with respect to a police officer-involved shooting is that the issues are complex and it’s not just a simple cut-and-dried investigation. Only a small percentage of these result in convictions. So you have to make sure that the investigation is thorough because from a prosecutor perspective, the thing you never want to have happen is for you to charge a case and then have a judge dismiss it and say that you did not have probable cause or the requisite facts.

I know from the perspective of the community, it’s really hard to understand why it takes so long because they are thinking, “Well, we need an answer. We need some action to happen.” … But in the course of getting it right, I think space is so critical for investigators to be able to do what they have to do.

And as your team worked through the process and reviewed the case, were you all on the same page, or were there lots of back-and-forth conversations?

The conversations were really important because — it wasn’t so much anybody saying, “I don’t feel like this case should be charged”; it was more everybody raising all the issues that a defense attorney would raise and kind of thinking through all of the issues. So even if you kind of thought this case should be charged, we were being very thorough and critical about all of the pieces of evidence we had and making sure that we were being thorough about … whether or not we believed we had probable cause.

CASTILE TRYING TO PUT OFFICER AT EASE

Is it fair to say that earlier on, you knew you were going to charge the case but that you needed more time to kind of poke holes and make sure you had looked it from every angle?

We didn’t make a decision about prosecution until after we had gotten the case, but I think that, I can speak for myself, I started feeling that this case should be charged when I heard the audio (from the squad camera) and you hear the tone of what’s happening with each of them and I am hearing Philando Castile trying to do everything he can to put the officer at ease and I am also hearing maybe confusing commands. So just for me, personally, that was when my thoughts started to change about this particular case.

And we had (Reynolds), who was sitting next to Philando Castile who told us what she perceived. Taking her account — though it was confusing, I’ll admit that — what she was saying was … he was trying to comply with the officer’s commands and was doing everything that he could to be respectful.

So that was my evolution as I was kind of thinking about this case. For me it’s about doing the right thing. I have to look at myself in the mirror, and I know that from the standpoint of that charging decision, I know forever I will be remembered as the person who, if you didn’t like that decision, I am the one that I guess “moved the cheese.” And for those who liked the decision, I guess it’s a bold, courageous decision or however people might characterize it. But trust me, no prosecutor wants to be in that spot. I mean it’s not something that I woke up and said I want to do. But I recognized that when I ran for election, this was something that I signed up to do.

Did you ever waver, especially considering you were the first in Minnesota to go there?

I felt good about it because at the end of the day, I have to just do what is right. That is what the public is asking me to do. To be fair and impartial and to think about justice and to think about everybody involved, the officer, Philando Castile and his family, Diamond Reynolds, her daughter. And it’s a heavy thing, to charge a police officer with a crime in this context in the line of duty, because Officer Yanez woke up that morning and his intentions were never to be in this situation. He didn’t wake up saying, “I want to kill somebody today.” He woke up and said, “I am going to do my job. I am going to protect the public and do it to the best of my ability.” … He was confronted with some choices, and from our perspective, he made the wrong choices that were in violation of the law.

‘A CASE OF UNREASONABLE PANIC’

You said when you announced your decision to bring charges in this case that “no reasonable officer knowing, seeing and hearing what Officer Yanez did at the time would have used deadly force.” Why do you believe Yanez shot him? Do you believe, as Gov. Mark Dayton said shortly after the shooting, that had Castile been white, he’d be alive today?

When I said that, I don’t think that an officer who was trained in the way a typical officer would be trained would have taken those actions; there were so many things that could have happened to avoid that.

And we can’t get in the mind of Yanez. But I think what the governor was trying to articulate is that we have to recognize that …we all come to our life or our situations with our own life experiences. We all have biases based upon how we were raised and our professional experiences inform our judgments and our decisions. Everybody in this world has it. It’s actually a survival mechanism, so in that context, was there implicit bias in this case? Well, I think in every context of police interaction there is that implicit bias. I have an implicit bias as I sit here today based on my life experiences. Now if we are talking about (whether) Officer Yanez intentionally shoot Philando Castile because of his race, the answer would be no, I don’t think so. Again, I don’t know what’s in the mind of an officer, but I think as a society, we should presume that he wouldn’t do that … — that (nobody) in our law enforcement would ever do that.

There were a whole host of other issues, though. Some people might point to the traffic stop itself. Our expert said it was unreasonable for Officer Yanez, as a car was driving down Larpenteur Avenue, to assume that … Philando Castile was the (suspect) in that robbery.

… When the governor was speaking, I think some people may have misinterpreted what he was saying. I think he was talking about this implicit bias that we all have, and in the context of how that affects communities of color, because I think if you talk to African-American men, oftentimes they share stories of having been pulled over multiple times or not been given the benefit of the doubt. Or that they are presumed to be aggressive and dangerous … and that can be very disheartening and degrading, and also just exhausting.

Are you saying you think Officer Yanez just panicked?

Yeah, this case was about unreasonable panic.

Officer Yanez entered into a voluntary separation agreement with St. Anthony after he was acquitted and is no longer serving there as a police officer. Do you feel like he is equipped to serve anywhere as a police officer after what happened?

No, I don’t think so, and I am glad that the city took the action that they took and … whatever is in Officer Yanez’s future, I hope it’s … good. … But I don’t think he should be a police officer. He couldn’t be a police officer in (Minnesota); I don’t think a community would want that.

A LOT TO ASK OF JURORS

You were the first county attorney in Minnesota to file charges against a police officer involved in an on-duty fatal shooting in at least the state’s modern history. Is it your belief that no other police officer has crossed that criminal line before?

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Body of kayaker recovered from Long Lake; woman missing since Saturday I can speak only to the cases that I have been involved in … Jan. 1 of 2011 to the present. … This … was the only case that I believe criminal charges were appropriate.

In the end, the state lost this case. Why do you think that was?

I think, again, whenever you are charging a police officer in the line of duty, that is a tough mountain to climb. In fact, I think it’s just a little more than 20 percent of these type of cases that actually result in a conviction, and so they are just extraordinarily hard. I think a big part of that is because you are really asking the jurors to … turn their world view upside down.

Because of many people’s trust in the police?

Yeah, and the lens they are then going to view the (case) with.

So you knew going in that it this was going to be a hard case to win?

Yeah.

How much involvement did you have with your team on making the calls about how to present the case and handle the trial?

Well, it’s probably the biggest case that has happened in my tenure as the county attorney, so I was very involved, but my style of leadership is not to micromanage people, and so I assembled … a really great prosecution team in Rick Dusterhoft, Jeff Paulsen and Clayton Robinson to actually handle the case — they have years and years of jury trial experience — and then I was updated along the way.

THE BCA INTERVIEW

you have heard criticism about your team’s decision to wait to introduce Yanez’s initial statement to BCA investigators until he was on the stand. The move ended up backfiring when the judge and the jury never got to hear that audio from Yanez. In retrospect, was that a mistake by the prosecution?

Well, I think you have to keep in perspective that the people who might be criticizing it weren’t really involved in trying cases and they probably weren’t in the courtroom. We did the best that we could. With respect to the audio of the BCA interview, based upon past practice of how things work in Ramsey County, that was a statement of the defendant, a party opponent, and the rules say you can introduce it at any particular time. We also believed with 99.9 percent certainty that Officer Yanez was going to take the stand based on conversations with the defense and other factors, so we made the strategic decision to introduce this interview through him. We wanted to make him listen to what he said on the stand and impeach him on the (discrepancies) that we thought were critical. Like how he never actually mentioned the word gun or seeing a gun (in his BCA interview), which was vastly different from what he testified in court.

So based upon past practice and what the rules allow, we didn’t think it was going to be an issue at all to introduce that evidence through Yanez … so of course we were surprised when the judge said we couldn’t and that took us off our game a little bit.

But I think the public needs to understand that what Officer Yanez said in that interview was still available to the jurors. Rick Dusterhoft just had to present it the old-fashioned way, which was to read what Yanez said while he cross-examined Yanez.

GOOD THINGS CAME FROM THE CASE, HE SAYS

Were you surprised by the verdict?

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Karl-Anthony Towns speaks out on Charlottesville, Philando Castile and his disappointment in President Trump We were. We thought the worst we were going to do was a hung jury. I mean, we felt we had appropriately charged this case. This case was about unreasonable panic. We thought our expert really laid the case down. We didn’t think that the defense experts, at least two of their three, were very effective. … It hit me like a ton of bricks when I found out it was a not-guilty on all charges.

But … that is what the jury decided, and I am a big believer — and I have an obligation — to support that process. And I asked the public to accept the verdict, too, and I got criticized by some for that, but that is the process.

And I think some good things happened as a result of this case, and because the state was willing to bring forward charges. And there is so much to learn from it. How we train officers in the future, implicit-bias training for police as well as everybody in the executive and judicial branches of government, (what are appropriate) use-of-force policies.

Also the fact that Officer Yanez is no longer working as a police officer, because of the actions that St. Anthony took there, because that is about accountability. When people are reviewing officers’ use-of-force, especially deadly force, we have to hold people accountable, and the public needs to know that that won’t always mean in the context of a criminal charges. In fact, those will continue to be rare, as they should be.

What kind of feedback did you get from law enforcement?

To this day, nobody has come up to me and said, “You blew it. You hurt us. You did something horrible.” But … I have friends in law enforcement who tell me that there are a lot of police officers around the state that are very upset. They think that the charges were not appropriate, that this was a tragic accident, not a crime. I can live with that because I believe I did the right thing.

But in September I had a lot of meetings that involved police agencies … and I got a lot of positive feedback from people in the police community then, (but) they whispered (it) in my ear.

A lot of those people were probably at the rank of sergeant or above, … and if they are a sergeant they are probably going somewhere in their career, meaning they had the capacity to see the bigger picture and could process things in a different way.

Let’s shift gears and talk about your counterpart across the river, Mike Freeman. He has a big decision coming up in whether to file charges in the officer-involved fatal shooting of Justine Ruszcyk Damond. People are anxiously waiting for him to say what he is going to do. What advice do you have for him? Have you been in communication with him?

Well, I don’t know all of what he is weighing … he is not telling me anything about his particular cases. But my advice would be to the public, that they give him all the space that he needs. Mike is grounded in fairness, in making the right decision, and he is going to do that, whatever it might be. … I would ask the public to be supportive of the hard work he … and his team (are) doing to try and get this right, because it’s about … getting to the truth, and then determining whether or not you can make charges.

You’re planning on running for county attorney again, right? Why do you want the job?

Yes, I will make an announcement at some point after the New Year. I have so many tell me, “Boy, you have the toughest job. I feel so sorry for you.” … But I feel very blessed and honored and humbled that I am in this position. I believe in the concept of vocation, and so I believe this is what I am supposed to do.