A former part-time Millvale police officer testified in federal court Monday that he told his partner she was wrong to repeatedly zap a drunk and handcuffed prisoner with her stun gun during a 2012 incident at the borough police station that he recorded on his cell phone.

“I didn’t think he needed to be tased,” Casey Bonincontro told a federal court jury on the first day of trial for Nicole Murphy, 30, charged with depriving Thomas Smith of his civil rights. “I think it was excessive.”

Mr. Bonincontro, 25, the key government witness and Officer Murphy’s former partner, said he yelled “No, Murphy, he’s relaxed” just before she shocked Mr. Smith as he was kneeling on the floor and scooting toward a cubicle divider on which he had been banging his head.

He said she then zapped him two more times, once with the weapon on drive stun and again using it on probe stun, in which two probes attached to wires penetrate the skin. After the two officers had transported him to the Allegheny County Jail, Mr. Bonincontro said he expressed his concern to his partner as they rode back to Millvale.

“I told her, ‘That wasn't cool,’” he said. “She said, ‘I know.’”

If Officer Murphy is convicted, she will never be a police officer again.

She and her lawyer, Robert Stewart, don’t dispute that she shocked Mr. Smith but said she did it to keep him from hurting himself as he repeatedly smacked his head against the desk divider.

Prosecutors say she used excessive force and then tried to create a cover story, lying in a criminal complaint and related use-of-force reports that Mr. Smith had resisted arrest, spat on Mr. Bonincontro and kicked her in the chest.

Mr. Bonincontro said Mr. Smith, who is mentally ill and a known drug and alcohol addict whom police had dealt with before, didn’t kick Officer Murphy or spit on him and was never a danger to anyone. He said he was babbling drunkenly and alternating between joking and insulting the officers and two medics in the room as he smacked his head against the divider. At one point, he taunted Officer Murphy by saying she was acting tough only because she had a badge.

But he said Mr. Smith was handcuffed the whole time and not able to cause any harm.

“The situation was relaxed,” he said. “I don’t believe he was violent.”

He said he had taken the cell phone video so he could show it to doctors at Western Psychiatric Institute, where he thought Mr. Smith should be taken because he had been treated there before. Officer Murphy wanted to take him to jail, he said.

When he later told Officer Murphy about the video on the way back from the jail, he said she asked him to delete it.

He said nothing but did not delete it, later showing it to his chief and the department’s expert on stun guns because he was worried he’d get in trouble if he had witnessed a crime and didn’t report it.

That video was later leaked to the media in early 2013, after which the FBI began an investigation leading to Officer Murphy’s indictment.

The trial will continue today before U.S. District Judge Arthur Schwab.

First Published: November 17, 2014, 5:53 p.m.
Updated: November 18, 2014, 4:21 a.m.