Ex-Philadelphia officer sentenced and immediately paroled after
conviction in traffic stop shooting
[July 18, 2025]
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A former Philadelphia police officer
who shot and killed a motorist during a traffic stop was sentenced and
granted parole Thursday by a judge, eliciting condemnations from the
city's district attorney and the victim's family.
Judge Glenn Bronson sentenced Mark Dial to 9 1/2 months in jail, and
immediately granted Dial parole because he had already been jailed for
10 months following his arrest in 2023.
A jury in May acquitted Dial, 29, of murder charges, and instead
convicted him of voluntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and
possessing an instrument of crime in the fatal shooting of 27-year-old
Eddie Irizarry.
Brian McMonagle, Dial's lawyer, said the judge did the right thing for a
“dedicated public servant” who “risked his life every day for perfect
strangers.”
District Attorney Larry Krasner said the judge went “way below”
sentencing guidelines in handing down a sentence that set Dial free. The
low end of the standard range of sentencing guidelines for the
conviction was 4 1/2 to nine years in prison, he said.
Krasner declined to criticize the judge but said he was “deeply
disappointed with a verdict that I think makes people lose faith in the
criminal justice system.”
Zoraida Garcia, an aunt of Irizarry's, told reporters after the
sentencing that if she had committed the crime, “I would have been doing
life in prison. But he’s a cop, so he gets the OK.” Another aunt, Ana
Cintron, said, “my nephew’s life doesn’t matter at all."
In court, Bronson said the shooting was not “a classic voluntary
manslaughter case,” that Dial's conduct was “demonstrably out of
character” and that Dial was not a threat to the public, the
Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
He also said that Dial, after shooting Irizarry six times, rushed
Irizarry to the hospital.
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Philadelphia police officer Mark Dial, center, arrives with
attorneys Brian McMonigle, left, and Fortunato Perri, right, for a
bail hearing at the Juanita Kidd Stout Center for Criminal Justice
in Philadelphia, Sept. 19, 2023. (Alejandro A. Alvarez/The
Philadelphia Inquirer via AP, File)
“I’ve never seen that happen in a voluntary manslaughter case,” he
said.
Dial's lawyers have insisted that the 2023 shooting was justified.
They say Dial thought Irizarry had a gun when he approached
Irizarry's car after officers spotted the car being driven
erratically and followed it for several blocks before it turned the
wrong way down a one-way street and stopped.
Police body camera video of the shooting shows Dial getting out of a
police SUV, striding over to Irizarry’s car and firing his weapon
six times at close range through the rolled-up driver’s side window.
The video shows Irizarry holding a seven-inch knife before he was
shot.
Another officer yelled “knife” as they had approached the vehicle,
according to the video, but Dial’s attorneys disputed those
assertions, saying the other officer yelled “Gun!,” that the knife
resembled a gun and that Dial had acted lawfully and in
self-defense.
Dial was released from custody in 2024 after prosecutors withdrew a
first-degree murder charge.
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