In January 2023, Tennessee resident Tyre Nichols passed away just days after suffering multiple grievous injuries in a violent beating administered by several former Memphis police officers.

On Wednesday, three of those ex-cops were shockingly acquitted by a jury on all state-level charges, including murder, after just eight hours of deliberation, Fox News reported.

Those defendants won't be walking free anytime soon, however, despite the acquittals, as they were all convicted on federal charges last year and face the possibility of being sentenced to decades in federal prison in the coming months.

Acquitted despite damning video evidence

Following a nine-day trial that concluded this week, a Memphis jury found former police officers Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, and Justin Smith not guilty on a slew of state criminal charges related to the 2023 beating death of Nichols.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents Nichols' family, decried the verdicts as a "devastating miscarriage of justice," and further asserted, "The world watched as Tyre Nichols was beaten to death by those sworn to protect and serve. That brutal, inhumane assault was captured on video, yet the officers responsible were acquitted."

Indeed, the Associated Press reported last year that while the former officers had claimed that Nichols had run from a routine stop and resisted arrest once caught by his pursuers, footage from multiple body cams and surveillance cameras in the area revealed otherwise.

The damning footage showed that the cops were highly aggressive from the get-go and, over several minutes, used their fists and feet, batons and tasers, and various restraint holds to severely beat Nichols, then joked about the injuries they'd inflicted while denying him immediate medical care and providing dishonest or misleading explanations about what happened to first responders, family members, and other officers and investigators.

Previously convicted on federal charges

In October 2024, the Justice Department announced that it had obtained convictions on federal charges for Bean, Haley, and Smith, which followed guilty pleas for two other former Memphis police officers involved in the death of Nichols, Emmitt Martin and Desmond Mills Jr, who'd acknowledged their unlawful assault of the victim and their failure to stop the others from employing an unreasonable use of force.

Bean and Smith were found guilty of attempting to cover up the use of excessive force and of providing false or misleading information about the incident, and face up to 20 years in federal prison.

Haley was found guilty of similar charges, pressed against the other officers, plus violating Nichols' civil rights and witness tampering, among other things, and faces the possibility of 40 or more years in prison.

Former officers still face federal sentencing, civil lawsuit filed by Nichols' family

The five former Memphis police officers were all scheduled to be sentenced in January, but those sentencing hearings were indefinitely postponed until after the trial on the state charges had concluded, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

Meanwhile, the mother of Nichols filed a civil suit against the Memphis Police Department and the city that demands $550 million -- a sum the city claims could bankrupt it -- but that suit had also been placed on hold for the duration of the federal and state-level trials.

It remains unclear at this time when the federal sentencing hearings will be held, and the civil suit is tentatively slated for trial in July 2026, but that timeline could potentially be sped up now that the criminal trials have been completed.

As for whether state prosecutors will seek a retrial, that seems unlikely, as Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy admitted to reporters, "I don't know what the grounds would be for that," and added, "We do have to accept the finality of the jury verdict in most cases."