A police officer who brutalized a 22-year-old Black man with an expandable baton during an arrest nearly seven years ago was convicted by a French court on Friday of “intentional violence” in one of the country’s highest-profile cases of abuse by the police.
The young man, Théo Luhaka, sustained a four-inch tear to his rectum after the police subdued him during an identity check while he was cutting through a known drug-dealing zone in his housing project in a suburb northeast of Paris.
Two other officers who assisted in the arrest were also found guilty at the court in Bobigny, a suburb northeast of Paris, in a decision that lawyers on both sides welcomed but that anti-police brutality activists called far too lenient.
Mr. Luhaka did not say a word to the mob of cameras and microphones that had crowded the exit of the courtroom. But he rested his hand on the shoulder of his lawyer, Antoine Vey, who called the ruling a…
