A judge has denied a motion to toss the 20-year prison sentence of former police officer Michael Slager, who murdered unarmed Black motorist Walter Scott in South Carolina in 2015. Slager tried to argue that his defense was ineffective, but the federal judge ruled “a careful review of this entire tragic episode makes plain that [Slager] has no one to blame for his present predicament and sentence but himself. What sealed his fate … was [his] own willful act of shooting an unarmed man in the back five times as he ran for his life.”