Dec. 23 (UPI) — A San Francisco jury has agreed with a homeless man who claimed he was acting in self defense when he struck a former city fire commissioner with a pipe during a street encounter in April.
Garret Doty, 25, was found not guilty by a California Superior Court jury on assault charges Friday, his public defenders announced.
Doty was arrested in April after striking former San Francisco Fire Commissioner Donald Carmignani with a metal pipe. Carmignani’s jaw was broken during the confrontation and Doty was subsequently charged with assault and battery.
Defense attorneys said Doty was protecting himself following an earlier attack against him by Carmignani, alleging the ex-city official had been involved in numerous assaults against unhoused people using bear spray.
Doty’s lawyer, Kleigh Hathaway, said her client had defended himself.
“Self-defense can be fierce because the brain goes into survival mode, and that fear response is sadly heightened for unhoused people like Mr. Doty, who live in constant exposure,” Hathaway said.
Defense attorneys said police included information on eight attacks in their report and said they were “possibly related.”
“The incident was widely reported at the time, as Carmignani’s attorneys released select video footage of the incident which did not include footage of how the alteration began,” they said. “Evidence and testimony later revealed that Carmignani first went after Doty with bear spray, where he also threatened to stab and kill him if he didn’t move his belongings in two hours.”
Carmignani’s former mother-in-law testified in court that she had identified him to police from security footage of a man attacking an unhoused person on the sidewalk near his home in November 2022.
Jurors heard testimony from 11 witnesses and reviewed chronological surveillance footage of the altercation before rendering their “not guilty” verdict, Doty’s attorneys noted.
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