Ex-Pennsylvania Officer Set For Civil Rights Sentencing

PITTSBURGH (AP) - A former Pennsylvania police officer faces sentencing for violating the civil rights of a man he threw to the ground and slugged.

Forty-three-year-old Norman Howard III was an officer in Redstone Township when the incident occurred in May 2013.

Federal prosecutors say Howard followed a car home when a man inside the vehicle gestured at the officer, prompting him to stop about 1:30 a.m. Howard pleaded guilty in October to assaulting the man and acknowledged filing a falsified a report about the incident.

Howard has agreed to never work as a police officer again in exchange for prosecutors dropping the civil rights charge from a felony to a misdemeanor. He faces up to a year in prison when he's sentenced by a federal judge in Pittsburgh on Monday afternoon.

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