YOUNGSTOWN Aquittal in case of shootout

The defense lawyers say their client didn't know he was dealing with cops.
By PATRICIA MEADE
VINDICATOR CRIME REPORTER
YOUNGSTOWN -- A jury in U.S. District Court in Akron has acquitted Newell Spann, who got into a shootout with police on the South Side.
"Do you know the odds of winning a federal case? About 1 in 10,000," said Youngstown attorney Don L. Hanni Jr. "I think it was racial profiling. He's a 25-year-old man who lives in the ghetto and never had a parking ticket in his life."
Racial profiling had nothing to do with it, said Robert Bulford, an assistant U.S. attorney. The jury simply believed Spann's testimony that he acted in self-defense, the prosecutor said Tuesday.
A grand jury indicted Spann in March on charges of assaulting a federal officer and using a firearm during a crime of violence. If convicted, Spann faced up to 10 years in prison on the assault charge and a mandatory 10 years on the firearm charge.
Hanni and Canfield attorney David J. Betras represented Spann. The trial was presided over by U.S. District Judge David D. Dowd Jr.
The charges followed Spann's March 4 shootout with members of the Mahoning Valley Violent Crimes Task Force. The charge centered on Deputy John Beshara, who is also special deputy U.S. marshal.
Spann, reports show, exchanged gunfire with Beshara, who sat in an unmarked cruiser with city Patrolman Michael Cox. When Beshara and Cox saw Spann, they believed he was someone else, someone for whom they had an arrest warrant.
Both Spann's GMC Jimmy and the unmarked cruiser ended up with bullet holes. No one was injured.
Chase
After the gunfire, Beshara and Cox followed and caught up with Spann on Market Street. Police later recovered a .38-caliber pistol in a wooded area where Spann told officers he had dropped it.
Hanni said Spann first exchanged vulgarities with the officers, then drove off, but made a turn into a parking lot on Miller Street and felt trapped. When he passed the unmarked cruiser on his way out of the lot, shots were fired and he shot back, the lawyer said.
A reporter asked why Spann, who has no criminal record, not even a parking ticket, had a gun. Hanni answered the question with a question: "If you were black and lived on Franklin Street, would you carry a gun?"
All the officers had to do, Hanni said, was identify themselves as police by turning on the unmarked cruiser's siren and portable red flashing light.
The officers, Betras said, weren't in uniform, and their winter jackets obscured their badges and the lettering on their police shirts.
"He thought they were there to rob him," Betras said.
Bulford said he knew all along that it would be difficult to disprove self-defense but the assault charge had to be brought.
"It was a really good issue of self-defense. They never identified themselves as police officers," Bulford said. "It's not pertinent who shot first -- jurors found he acted in self-defense. I thought self-defense wasn't justified; we thought [Spann] was the aggressor."
meade@vindy.com