Black Lives Matter Shooting: Allen Scarsella Attacked African-American Protesters, But An All-White Jury Will Decide His Fate

The sentencing of a white man who allegedly shot into a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, will reportedly be determined by a jury seated Tuesday without any black people on it. Attorneys involved in the case reportedly questioned jurors for six days on issues related to gun violence and Black Lives Matter and settled on a jury that consists of 11 men and three women, none of whom are African-American.

Five black men were injured after Allen Scarsella, 23, shot into a protest on Nov. 23, 2015 outside of a police department in Hennepin County, which is located roughly 13 miles south of Minneapolis' city center. Scarsella has pleaded non-guilty to the seven felony counts he is charged with, including first-degree assault. He was not charged with a hate crime.

Black Lives Matter organized the demonstration in response to the Nov. 15, 2015, police killing of Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old black man who was shot and killed by an officer while Clark was in handcuffs, according to local reports on March 30, 2016. Of the 1,091 Americans killed by law enforcement officers in the country in 2016, 258 were reported to be black, according to a The Guardian report.

Scarsella went to the 2015 rally with three other men who all wearing ski masks. In opening statements Tuesday, the prosecutor, Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Judith Hawley, said Scarsella went to the protest looking to incite violence, pointing to the fact that he was armed with a gun that he had previously described in a text message as "specially designed by Browning (a gun company) to kill brown people."

Public defender Peter Martin told the jurors that Scarsella fired his weapon in self-defense after he and the other men found themselves surrounded by 30 to 40 protestors who asked why they were there while imploring them to take off their ski masks. Martin told jurors that Scarsella was “scared out of his mind” and yelled at the protesters to stay back. But he said that six or seven of the protesters began grabbing and punching the four men, prompting him to start firing.