Expert: Police applied excessive force, breached standards while restraining Manuel Ellis

An expert in police use of force testified Monday afternoon that three Tacoma police officers applied it excessively and breached longstanding law enforcement standards on the night Manuel Ellis died.

Testifying in the trial of three Tacoma officers accused in Ellis’ death, John J. Ryan, a national consultant in law enforcement training who spent 20 years as a police officer, said Ellis posed no threat that would have warranted the actions of the officers on trial for his death.

Ellis, 33, died March 3, 2020, after repeatedly telling police he couldn’t breathe while they applied force. The Pierce County Medical Examiner ruled Ellis’ death a homicide caused by oxygen deprivation from physical restraint. Lawyers for the officers contend that the high level of methamphetamine found in Ellis’ system, combined with a heart condition, killed him.

Officers Matthew Collins, 40, Christopher “Shane” Burbank, 38, and Timothy Rankine, 34, are on trial for first-degree manslaughter - marking the first time in 85 years that so many officers in Washington state have been charged for an on-duty death. Collins and Burbank, the first officers to encounter Ellis and contact him for reportedly trying to enter a car as it passed through an intersection, also face charges of second-degree murder.

Rankine responded later and sat on Ellis’s back for minutes, even though Rankine admitted to detectives that he heard Ellis say he couldn’t breathe. All three officers have pleaded not guilty. They are free on bail and remain employed by the Tacoma Police Department on paid leave.

Collins and Burbank told detectives that Ellis initiated the aggression, but four eyewitnesses, two of whom recorded cellphone videos of police handling Ellis roughly, have testified that the officers were the aggressors and Ellis did nothing to provoke them.

Ellis was struck, jolted with Taser strikes, placed in a carotid artery neck hold and rendered unconscious, cuffed with his hands behind his back, hobbled with a cord linking his ankles to his wrists, and sat and knelt upon by officers with a spit hood over his face while he was lying prone and repeatedly saying he could not breathe.

Ryan testified that the officers had control of Ellis and continued to apply force.

“Once the attack ends, and you’ve got him on the ground, you can’t keep hitting him,” Ryan said, referring to a portion of the video that showed Collins repeatedly striking Ellis around the head. “I don’t see active resistance here. He’s on his back with his feet in the air.”

Ryan testified that video evidence showing Collins repeatedly striking Ellis constituted excessive force, as did a carotid artery hold by Collins that pulled Ellis backward. Meanwhile, the eyewitness video showed Ellis raising his hands over his head as Burbank jolted him with a Taser multiple times.

Ellis “appears to be in a submissive position” when hit with a Taser, Ryan said.

Seconds later, Ellis goes limp. Ryan said he was rendered unconscious by Collins’ squeezing his carotid artery.

“At this point, we don’t see any assaultive conduct,” Ryan said. If the officers’ claims about Ellis hitting them were true, he said, the use of force would have had to stop at that point. If the eyewitness testimony that Ellis did not provoke the officers’ actions is correct, then every action by Burbank and Collins was excessive, he said.

As the video progresses, Collins’ knee is visible on the back of Ellis’s neck, which Ryan testified is inconsistent with police training standards. “All the training is to avoid the neck, avoid the head and the center of the back” because it risks serious injury to a subject, he said.

Burbank’s three Taser strikes to Ellis’s torso also constituted excessive force, Ryan testified.

“From what we can see in the video, I don’t see any threat” to the officers from Ellis, Ryan said. Soon, Ryan said, more officers arrived, and Ellis was placed in a hobble, strapping his handcuffed hands to his feet. At that point, Ryan said, the hobble completely nullified any threat Ellis posed to officers.

Ryan said police have been trained for decades to avoid causing “compression asphyxia” by placing weight on people in prone restraint, as Ellis was with the hobble cord. Yet Rankine told detectives he placed his full weight at the center of Ellis’s back while Ellis was in prone restraint.

“It’s going to compress the body at the neck and the middle of the back and will cut off the ability to breathe,” Ryan said, referring to Rankine’s actions.

He described Collins’ and Burbank’s actions as “inappropriate.”

“You’ve got to move the person off their stomach as soon as they’re restrained. That was not done. … They didn’t get off him, and they didn’t move him into a rescue or recovery position,” Ryan testified.

Rankine placed Ellis on his side in the recovery position at least twice — to search him for weapons and later as medics approached. But in between those respites, Rankine “specifically said he instructed the officers to roll Ellis back on his stomach, and we reapplied pressure on him to hold him down until the fire department got there,” Ryan said.

Pierce County Superior Court Judge Bryan Chushcoff informed the jury Monday afternoon that the trial is on track to conclude during the first week of December — in line with the original estimate — and then jury deliberations would begin. As of last week, the prosecution’s case was three weeks behind schedule, but Chushcoff disallowed several prosecution witnesses last week, and the state Attorney General’s Office, which is prosecuting the case, eliminated others.

The prosecution expects to rest its case by the end of the day Wednesday, the final day of court this week. Defense lawyers for the officers told the court on Monday that they expect to present a swift case. The judge told jurors if deliberations stretch into the week of Christmas, there will be no court that week, and deliberations would resume Jan. 2.

Testimony is scheduled to resume Tuesday with Ryan under cross-examination.

This story was originally published November 6, 2023 at 5:12 PM.