A wonderful precedent. Now if only it could be applied to other professions, and lower-profile cases...
In areas where we move away from humans doing work into humans checking the work of agents, we should be worried about an arrangement where the human is present only as an accountability sink for the mistakes of the agent.
His error in judgement may have been he hadn't investigated the problem sufficiently. Then falsely testified to the government. That's a big deal on its own.
The officer involved might have been fired or reprimanded, we don't know from that article.