The jury watched the body-camera footage on the first day of trial. The 44-second clip that millions of people had already seen online was played in a courtroom where 12 jurors watched it without distraction and without the ability to scroll past it.
They saw Austin reach for his pocket. They saw the phone. They saw Dempsey's lunge. They heard Austin say he was 17 while he was on the ground in the grass. They heard Chloe scream.
They heard Dempsey say Austin was reaching for a weapon when the footage showed otherwise.
The drug-test results were presented by a toxicologist who explained in plain terms what the substance in Dempsey's system could do to judgment and perception at the levels recorded in his test. The expert described how the impairment could affect a person's ability to assess situations accurately, regulate emotion, and respond proportionally to what was happening in front of them.
The defense tried to argue that the substance might have been consumed after the incident rather than before it. The toxicology evidence presented at trial established timing that contradicted that theory, and the expert held firm under cross-examination.
The jury deliberated for two days and returned guilty verdicts on every charge: assault involving a minor, false arrest, being on duty under the influence of a controlled substance, filing a false incident report, and misconduct in public office. The defense had spent five days trying to separate the encounter into pieces, asking jurors to treat the initial suspicion, the movement toward the pocket, the tackle, the report, and the medication as independent issues. The prosecution's position was that the evidence made more sense when seen as one continuous chain of decisions, beginning with an unsupported assumption and ending with a report that described the phone movement as something the video did not support. The jury accepted that account across all five counts.
Five convictions were delivered in sequence in a courtroom that was full for the reading of each one.