Prosecutors have twice charged law enforcement officers for inaction during school shootings. Juries aren’t buying it.

(CNN) — Since the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, the law enforcement protocol for responding to active shootings is to stop the attacker as quickly as possible.

Yet twice in recent years — in Parkland, Florida, and in Uvalde, Texas — school police officers have allegedly failed to follow that protocol.

In both instances, prosecutors criminally charged the officer for their alleged inaction. And in both cases, a jury found them not guilty of all charges.

While the details differ, the acquittals of Scot Peterson in Parkland and Adrian Gonzales in Uvalde demonstrate how difficult it is to prosecute law enforcement officers and suggest many jurors do not regard hesitation during a school shooting as a crime, legal experts said. The acquittals also offer insights into the upcoming trial of former Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo on charges of child abandonment.

Before hearing from the officer’s perspective, it’s easy to blame them for not responding quickly, said Jeremy Eldridge, a criminal trial defense attorney and former prosecutor in Baltimore. But after hearing testimony, jurors tend to have more empathy.

“It becomes a lot more difficult once that officer is humanized to blame that officer for, frankly, the actions of another,” he said, referring to the shooter.

The acquittals of these officers also contrast with the successful prosecutions in Michigan and Illinois against the parents of mass shooters.

Together, the verdicts in these cases indicate prosecutors are focusing on a broader cast of defendants after a mass shooting — but juries so far seem more willing to grant deference to police than to the parents of shooters.

However, Eldridge said he doesn’t think the two acquittals will dissuade prosecutors from bringing charges in similar future cases. “The public is always looking for accountability,” he said, and that has increasingly extended to people other than the shooter.

Similarities of Parkland and Uvalde trials

Gonzales’ trial stemmed from the massacre of May 2022, when an 18-year-old gunman entered Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 children and two teachers. It took 77 minutes for law enforcement to stop and kill the shooter — even though Gonzales was at the school more than a minute before the massacre began.

Prosecutors alleged Gonzales failed to locate, engage or delay the gunman when he arrived at the school and while the shooter was still outside.

When he got there, a teacher’s aide told him what the shooter was wearing and the direction he was heading, before they both heard gunshots. Those gunshots from the parking lot were 59 seconds before the gunman walked into the school building, CNN’s analysis found.

His defense highlighted what he did do, such as calling for help, finding a map and helping evacuate students from other parts of the school. Gonzales said he never saw the gunman and did not fire a shot. After the shooting, he told investigators he heard the gunfire but didn’t know where it was coming from. The jury also heard Gonzales say in an interview with investigators that he got “tunnel vision” in the moment and made a “mistake.”

Gonzales was found not guilty of 29 counts of child endangerment after a trial that included dozens of witnesses and his taped interview with investigators. He would have faced six months to two years in prison for each count if convicted.

This was just the second criminal prosecution of an officer responding to a school shooting. Peterson, the former sheriff’s deputy in Parkland, was found not guilty of child neglect, culpable negligence and perjury for staying outside the school building during the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Prosecutors accused Peterson of ignoring his training and taking cover for more than 45 minutes outside the school as 17 people, including 14 students, were killed inside.

His defense, led by Mark Eiglarsh, argued he was not properly equipped to confront a shooter with an AR-15, he couldn’t pinpoint the location of the gunfire and he did not legally qualify as a caregiver because he was a law enforcement officer.

Eiglarsh told CNN’s Laura Coates that the Peterson and Gonzales cases had key similarities.

“There is definitely a reasonable doubt about whether (Gonzales) even saw the shooter go in (to the school),” he said. “That’s the same thing that happened with my case.”

Prior to Gonzales’ trial, Eiglarsh told CNN there was a wide gap between an officer failing to follow proper protocol and acting criminally.

“A lot of officers are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. In other words, they go in right away, do what they’re supposed to do in their minds. They get in trouble if things don’t go right because they didn’t wait for someone to tell them what to do,” he said. “And conversely, inactivity now gets criminalized.”

The challenge for prosecutors

Prosecutors generally face an uphill battle when charging police officers, as juries tend to be reluctant to second-guess officers acting in the heat of the moment, the legal experts said. That’s especially true in a case accusing them of inaction, Eldridge said.

“There are certainly cases where an officer not following his training can result in serious bodily injury and is criminal, but we’re not just talking about not following training,” he said. “We’re talking about hesitation. We’re talking about running towards danger, and I think that analysis is very difficult once the officer is humanized in front of a jury.”

The challenge for state prosecutors is they are focused on analyzing the officer’s actions with 20-20 hindsight, while the defense is focused on what the officer was thinking in a fast-moving, high-pressure situation, Eldridge said.

People want law enforcement to run into danger, “but they might have given their reasons, as we have seen in two prosecutions, about why they hesitated,” he said.

Especially in smaller jurisdictions like Uvalde, there is a lot of pressure on elected officials to bring charges as a form of accountability, Eldridge said. He described the child endangerment charges in Uvalde as a “creative” use of the law.

“But I think what the juries are showing is that being creative with the law may not be effective in these situations,” he said, reiterating he still expects to see similar prosecutions in the future.

Ven Johnson, a Detroit attorney who represented families in a civil lawsuit over the 2021 shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan, said law enforcement has a hard decision to make in those intense moments. If they enter an active situation right away, they could be putting themselves and other students in danger, he said.

He said he believes the resolution to the Uvalde case might make prosecutors more hesitant to bring charges against police for alleged inaction.

“A prosecutor in the future will say, you know, I’m not going to charge this guy because even if I charge him I likely won’t win, so therefore that would make me look bad,” he said. Still, he believed the prosecution “did the right thing” in pressing charges.

Uvalde chief on trial next

These issues will all be at play in Arredondo’s upcoming trial in Uvalde, but one of the key differences is he was in a leadership position that day.

The former Uvalde schools police chief has pleaded not guilty to 10 felony charges of child endangerment for allegedly failing to recognize the incident as an active shooting and failing to take proper action to intervene, the indictment says. A trial date has not been set.

During the shooting, Arredondo made a decision to treat the gunman as a barricaded subject and not confront him for over an hour, even after it was confirmed children were trapped in a classroom with the shooter.

Arredondo was described in a Justice Department report as the de facto on-scene commander. However, Arredondo has said he did not see himself as the incident commander and instead was “responding as a police officer.”

Prosecutors may have a stronger case because Arredondo was the chief of the Uvalde schools police department, while Gonzales and Peterson were low-level officers, Eldridge said.

“That decision-making authority is going to make all the difference in the world in that prosecution,” he said. “If the officers are responding to your direction, and they’re … holding off from action as a result of your decision, then I think that juries are going to be less likely to empathize.”

Gonzales’ acquittal may also come into play in the minds of jurors, according to Johnson.

“The jury’s also going to know that these families of the victims have had no justice so far,” he said. “So maybe that jury will be more inclined to convict so the families get some level of justice.”

No matter what, the case will be emotional. Every prosecution reopens old wounds for families who lost children, Eiglarsh said.

“I still haven’t recovered from that trial,” he said of the Parkland case. “I still think about the loss that those people suffered, and I think about everyday walking into that courtroom feeling that loss yet having to go to battle. It was brutal. I don’t ever want to do anything like that again.”

CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz and Matthew J. Friedman contributed reporting.

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