Michael Mineo, the tattoo artist who accused five NYPD officers of beating and sodomizing him in a Brooklyn subway station and sued the the city in addition to pressing criminal charges against the accused officers, has opted to drop his long-running lawsuit according to his attorney.
The News reports that Mineo's attorney informed a judge overseeing the latest civil case that Mineo decided to drop his third civil suit against the city before it went to trial. The lawyer, Kevin Mosley, told the paper that Mineo had moved on from the incident and "doesn't want to revisit what was to him a very traumatic time." Still, the trial has been adjourned to June, should Mineo decide to go forward with it by then.
If Mineo is in fact finished with the suit, it's the end of an eight-year ordeal that began in October 2008 when a then 24-year-old Mineo said that five officers beat him during an arrest for smoking a joint while he walked to the Prospect Park B/Q stop. During the arrest, Mineo claimed that one of the cops sodomized him with his radio antenna according to initial repporting, though as more details came to light, the accusation involved a police officer sodomizing Mineo with a baton instead.
While three police officers who eventually went to trial over the accusations were eventually acquitted in 2010, Mineo also sued the NYPD starting in 2009. Both civil trials ended in mistrials in 2010. Mosley told the News that he still believed Mineo was beaten and sodomized by the police officers, but that if Mineo wants to drop the suit, he had to respect his wishes.
