Paralysed US police shooting victim Jacob Blake released from handcuffs in hospital bed

Police have removed handcuffs shackling Jacob Blake, who is paralyzed after US police shot him repeatedly in the back, to his hospital bed and stopped monitoring him, Blake's lawyer said Friday.

African-American Blake, 29, was shot seven times in the back point blank over the weekend by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin and has no movement from the waist down.

Word that Blake was tied to his hospital bed in Wisconsin, his father said one ankle was shackled, had caused a further uproar amid a groundswell of national anger over yet another shooting of a black man by police.

Also read: Washington: Thousands march to denounce racism on anniversary of King's speech

Blake's attorney Patrick Cafferty said Blake was restrained in his hospital bed and officers were watching over him because of an outstanding warrant stemming from a domestic violence-related incident in July.

Police union gives its version of Blake's shooting

Meanwhile, the Kenosha police union on Friday offered the most detailed accounting to date on officers' perspective of the moments leading up to police shooting Jacob Blake, saying he had a knife and fought with officers, putting one of them in a headlock and shrugging off two attempts to stun him.

The statement from Brendan Matthews, attorney for the Kenosha Professional Police Association, goes into more detail than anything that has been released by the Wisconsin Department of Justice, which is investigating.

US President Donald Trump took to Twitter to address the protests and said ''Kenosha has been very quiet for the third night in a row or, since the National Guard has shown up. That’s the way it works, it’s all very simple. Portland, with a very ungifted mayor, should request help from the Federal Government. If lives are endangered, we’re going in!''

'Self-defense'

A high-profile lawyer representing the 17-year-old shooter charged with killing two protesters and wounding another during demonstrations on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin said on Friday that his client had acted in self-defense.

Atlanta-based attorney Lin Wood said video footage of the altercation would vindicate Kyle Rittenhouse despite what he described as misinformation being spread by the media.

"Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. Murder charges are factually unsupportable. An egregious miscarriage of justice is occurring with respect to this 17-year old boy," Wood said on Twitter.

Summer of protests

The shooting of Blake in front of three of his children has turned Kenosha, a predominantly white city of about 100,000 people on Lake Michigan, into the latest flashpoint in ongoing nationwide protests over police brutality and racism.

It also galvanized protesters who gathered in Washington on Friday to commemorate the 1963 march where Martin Luther King Jr made his historic "I Have a Dream" speech.

The summer of protests ignited after video footage showed a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of a Black man, George Floyd. Floyd later died and the since-fired officer has been charged with murder.