Memphis officials ask court to strike statements about Atlanta police unit from a civil lawsuit filed by Tyre Nichols’ mother

By Raja Razek and Claudia Dominguez, CNN

(CNN) — The City of Memphis and other officials have filed a motion seeking to strike certain statements from a civil lawsuit filed by the mother of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year old Black man who died after being violently beaten by Memphis police in January.

Court documents filed Friday in the US District Court in the Western District of Tennessee show the city and officials asked the court to strike “all allegations related to the RED DOG Unit” because they are “immaterial, impertinent, or scandalous statements that are unduly prejudicial to the City Defendants and have no bearing on or relevance to Plaintiff’s alleged claims against the City.”

The complaint filed by the Nichols family alleges “Chief Davis and Assistant Chief Jones’ history with the Atlanta Police Department and their involvement with the RED DOG Unit should have given the City pause before hiring them.”

Atlanta’s RED DOG unit – an acronym said to stand for Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia – was politically popular but was shut down in 2011 after years of complaints, including the filing of a federal lawsuit by customers at a gay bar after an aggressive raid, CNN previously reported. Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis, who is one of the defendants in the lawsuit, and assistant police chief Shawn Davis were previously involved with the unit, according to the court motion.

In the court filing asking to strike mentions of RED DOG, the city and officials argued the “plaintiff supports her claims against the City by pleading allegations related to the Atlanta-based RED DOG Unit’s alleged practices and constitutional violations, none of which establishes that the City of Memphis was the moving force or a direct causal link in Mr. Nichols’ alleged constitutional deprivation.”

“Any alleged past wrongs of the RED DOG Unit are irrelevant to the City’s alleged liability in this case and only serve to prejudice the City,” the motion goes on.

Five members of a similar so-called “elite” police unit, Memphis’ SCORPION unit, were charged with murder in Nichols’ brutal beating. The officers repeatedly punched and kicked Nichols following a traffic stop and brief foot chase on January 7. He was hospitalized and died three days later. Memphis police disbanded the SCORPION unit in January, just a day after video of Nichols’ beating was publicly released.

In April, Nichols’ family filed a $550 million federal lawsuit against the city of Memphis, its police department and what the suit said were “unqualified, untrained, and unsupervised” officers assigned to a special unit who brutally beat the 29-year-old Black man after the traffic stop.

The lawsuit, filed by lawyers for Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, said the fatal beating was the “direct and foreseeable product of the unconstitutional policies, practices, customs, and deliberate indifference of the City of Memphis” and its police officials.

CNN has reached out to the Nichols’ family attorney for a statement.

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CNN’s Sarah Dewberry and Zoe Sottile contributed to this report.