Glassnoser
1mo ago
The difference is they weren't random bystanders whose intentions are unclear and who deserve the benefit of the doubt. They came there to harass and impede ICE officers, and they harassed and impeded ICE officers. ICE officers were entirely reasonable to expect escalation.
What intentions are you talking about exactly? Intention to impede ICE doesn't come close to supporting a reasonable belief that she had the intention of running him over.
There were dozens of attacks, including vehicular attacks, shootings, and others, on ICE officers.
Dozens out of how many interactions? The US has 350 million people. Extremely rare events that will never happen to you or to anyone you know happen every day. Dozens doesn't even come close to that level.
I can totally accept the idea that he might have reasonably thought there was chance she would run him over and that there was a certain level of hostility that made it more likely. But the level of risk aversion it takes to say that that rises to a sufficient level to justify killing someone is astounding to me.
That happened many times already, including to the very same agent who was attacked this time.
This indicates to me that he putting himself into situations he should not be putting himself into. To the extent this fear of being hit by a car is legitimate, it would be far better for the police to respond to it by avoiding the situations that lead to it. There are reports coming out about how poorly trained and selected these officers are and I suspect that goes a long way to explaining these incidents. Do you really think it's preferrable that ICE kills people to send the message that people should stop protesting them in the way they've been doing rather than adopt standard practices that avoid these risks entirely?
So it is not a stretch at all that somebody might try to attack the ICE officer with the vehicle, it's a fact.
What's a stretch is that this particular person in this particular situation is going to attack him and will do so in a way that poses sufficient risk to him that killing her was the appropriate response.
And it's not a stretch that this somebody may be somebody who is already actively taunting and harassing ICE agents, and went as far as receiving training how to do that. It's a very plausible conclusion.
Where are you getting the idea that she was taunting ICE agents from?
Glassnoser
1mo ago
I gave you an example. Even though murder doesn't necessarily require intent to kill, attempted murder does. Otherwise, there is no "attempt". You seem to be assuming that an attempt to complete an act that would constitute murder if it resulted in death constitutes attempted murder. That's not true.
Another problem is that you assume resisting arrest with a car is attempted murder. It is not necessarily. The car would have to be used in an attempt to kill the officer. Resisting arrest by driving away is not attempted murder if there is not intent on killing the officer with the car. Even the risk that the officer might be killed is not enough on its own to turn it into attempted murder. That is true even if it would be murder had the officer been accidentally killed.
Killing someone while committing a felony is not necessarily felony murder. It depends on the felony. It's not just any felony. There is also the merger doctrine which excludes felonies where the elements would constitute the elements of murder. That would seem to apply in this case. If you're arguing that the felony is the act of hitting the cop with the car and that would be murder if the cop died, then it can't be felony murder.
The felony has to be a separate act from the one that resulted in death. For example, you commit robbery and then shoot someone. That's felony murder even if you shot them by accident. But if you don't actually shoot them, the robbery isn't attempted murder just because you could have accidentally shot someone. That would make every armed robbery felony murder.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
If I visit the US as a tourist, I cannot work there, despite being there legally. The right to work is not the test. There are several visas that don't allow one to work.
The relevant point here, regardless of how you want to define words, is that the US is breaking the law by deporting people who it should not be deporting, both legally and morally. More importantly, they should not be being deported, legally or morally in the way that they are.
The reality is that ICE is disappearing people without due process and sending them to be tortured in prison in El Salvador without so much as a criminal charge, let alone a trial. It's not histrionic to describe them that way. To deny that and say they're only deporting illegal immigrants in accordance with existing law elides the fact that these people's rights are being abused in myriad ways and that they legally cannot actually be deported. The US is breaking the law.
You can come up with some argument why technically the definition of illegal immigrants means that even though they can't be deported that's the correct label to use, but the original claim was clearly trying to say that everything is on the up and up and no one was being mistreated. The alleged histrionics are much closer to the truth.
I have never seen anything approaching a reasonable defence of this.
I don't understand what you think normally prevents drivers from fleeing traffic stops. Police don't ordinarily put themselves in front of vehicles to prevent them from leaving. Are you saying that they do and that, because they are legally allowed to shoot drivers in these situations, that's how they prevent driver's from fleeing traffic stops?
The reality is that drivers absolutely can just flee a traffic stop without getting shot, which I think you probably understand, so I really don't get what you're trying to say.
Is your argument that police need the right to shoot at people driving their vehicles at them to protect themselves in such situations?
I agree with you that if for some reason police officers did have good reason to be physically blocking a car with their bodies that they'd have the right to shoot someone who tried to run them over if it would help (which it normally wouldn't), and for that reason, there is some additional deterrence for the driver to run the police officer over.
But in reality, the cop shooting the driver would not normally prevent him from being run over, and it would also be a crime for the driver to run him over (in addition to the crime of fleeing). So there is plenty of deterrent. The police do not need an infinite level of deterrence capability to protect themselves against minute risks, which seem to be regularly exaggerated.
You could have a legal system that gave police very wide latitude to use the threat of force to enforce the law, incluing deliberately placing themselves in harms way, daring suspects to do something dangerous and risk getting shot. But that's not the legal system the United States has. It puts more value on protecting criminals from themselves than from giving the police the maximum level of coercive tools. It expects police officers to avoid dangerous situations to minimize the risk of anyone, including suspects from getting hurt. The shooter went against those expectations and did something he wasn't supposed to do, and it resulted in someone's death.
Its a very perverse incentive, to say the least. "Why not add vehicular manslaughter to my array of charges in exchange for a 2% chance of escaping for a few more hours."
I don't get what you're saying here. Doesn't that quote show how the supposed incentive you're alleging doesn't exist? Why would anyone make that trade off?
That is a sufficient deterrent. You don't need to add death on top of decades in prison to the consequences of this decision. If the police think that that deterrent isn't enough, they can just not block moving vehicles with their bodies.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
You really need to watch all the videos. Each video on its own can easily give one a false impression that is totally dispelled by another video. He clearly stopped and turned to face the car just as she was finishing backing up.
It's very hard to determine the relative movement of objects in the cell phone video because the cell phone is moving the entire time. It moves quite a bit when stops and shoots at the car because he's doing a lot with his hands.
A lot of people even think it's a bodycam video and are probably assuming its movement tracks the movement of his torso. If you make that false assumption, you're going to think he never stopped moving and that the car hit his body. But the cell phone video doesn't show that. All you know is his hand didn't stop moving and his hand hit the car, which you can see in the other videos.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
Well at a minimum, it doesn't appear that the officer was trying to game the situation by setting up a situation here if the woman tried to drive away, then he'd have an excuse to shoot her.
It seems like that's exactly what he was trying to do. What in the video made you think that's not what was going on?
Also, it doesn't appear that this woman was just an innocent bystander or an "observer," but rather she was part of the crew that were trying to obstruct and provoke ICE agents.
Sure. I didn't think there were a lot of people taking that idea seriously.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
I agree that it makes it more likely. I still think it's more likely she was not trying to do that. If the entire case hinged on the idea that it was reasonable for him to think she was trying to hit him, I would say that was false on the balance of probabilities, but would not rise to the level of proof beyond all reasonable doubt. The problem is that that is just one part of a whole series of things the officer needs to show in order to claim self-defence, including that it was reasonable for him to be standing there in the first place, that shooting her was his only option, that that danger still existed at the time at a point he could have decided not to shoot her, and that shooting her protected his life, each of which I think is false.
I also think it's still extremely unlikely she was trying to seriously injure him. I could buy that she intended to knock him over or something without seriously injuring him, maybe being unaware of how dangerous that was. I could also buy that she came close enough to doing that that he reasonably thought she had worse intentions, but I still think he knew enough to know that that wasn't very likely and if he did think it was likely, he had all the less reason to try to block her escape in that way. I also think it should have been clear to before he started shooting that she was not going to run him over. There are just too many very unlikely things that all have to be true for him not to be guilty.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
It doesn't contradict that. I really get the impression many of the people in this thread haven't seen all of the videos, particularly the one shot from the other side of the street where you can see the front of the car. It's hard to tell what the car is doing from the cell phone video. But in the other video, it is perfectly clear when the car starts moving.
The one thing the cell phone video changed my mind about was how likely it was that she saw him. I was quite surprised about where she was looking while backing up. I thought it was very odd that she looked up while backing up instead of backwards or at the back-up camera. So I do think it's much more likely she knew he was in front of the car before she started driving forward.
However, she was focused on backing up and was probably glancing up at the rear view mirror, so I can imagine how she might have not really noticed him or if she had, how she could have failed to notice where he stopped walking while she was looking away (I think at the side view mirror).
This does make it more likely that she was trying to hit him, but I still think it wasn't very likely, especially not likely that she was trying to seriously injure him. Someone suggested that she might have been trying to gently tap him, which would certainly have been reckless. That's much more believable.
The doesn't undermine many of the other key facts, such as the fact that he unnecessarily and recklessly placed himself in danger seemingly to give himself an excuse to shoot her should she try to run away. Although it's quite possible he was simply being grossly negligent as to the likelihood she would try to escape.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
He didn't shoot the wife, he shot the driver. The driver was not being aggressive in that video.
I don't see what difference it makes that they were trying to confront ICE officers. Is that supposed to support the idea that she was trying to run him over? Because that seems like a major stretch.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
But he didn't act under that assumption or else he would not have shot her. What is not reasonable is to assume that someone in the process of backing up while a police officer yells at her repeatedly to get out of her car and while her wife tells her to drive away, is not about to drive away, but also to think that if she does drive away that it will be a murder attempt.
I have no interest in bending social convention to accommodate the homicidal.
What social convention is being bent? That police can always assume no one will try to hurt them? How is that social convention consistent with their carrying guns?
Then why are the police told not to do it? What does it accomplish? If it was reasonable for him to think he was going to die the second the car started moving, how is that consistent with the idea that it wasn't reckless to stand there?
Even shooting her did not prevent the car from coming at him. Lots of his defenders are arguing that he was both at imminent risk of severe bodily harm or death and that the car did in fact hit him, even though he shot her three times. If we grant that, then we have to admit that he was doing something very dangerous.
The police are allowed to do dangerous things, but not without sufficient purpose to justify the risk. What was accomplished by putting himself in that position? If we grant everything necessary to say that it was reasonable for him to be there, then what he must have been doing was helping to detain her by creating a situation where she could not flee without giving him an excuse to kill her. The police are explicitly told not to do that, and the outcome of this event shows exactly why.
The law is not actually set up to create death traps for those who don't cooperate with the police. Self-defence law revolves around preventing death, not around giving the police sufficient excuse to kill so as to induce cooperation.
By the way, the car was not stationary. It was backing up while he placed himself in front of it and then stopped for less than a second before moving forward. He knew she was being uncooperative and heard her wife telling her to drive away. He should have known what was about to happen and seemed to anticipate it when he moved his phone to his left hand and then drew his gun.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
That's not shooting them for fleeing. That's shooting them to protect people.
The distinction is important because the law does, in fact, grant open season for any given criminal who wants to flee the police to do so long as he doesn't pose an imminent threat of severe bodily harm. Trying to use that as a reductio ad absurdum fails because the supposedly absurd scenario is unquestionably the current law.
They can, they simply have to have a reasonable belief that the person poses a threat to the officer or others.
A lot of people defending the shooting are being overly loose with what constitutes sufficient grounds for deadly force. It's important to stress that is generally not permissible to kill someone just because you have a reasonable belief he poses a threat to others. The vast majority of cases where such a threat exists would not a justify a killing, and this case, in my opinion falls squarely in that case.
The threat must be imminent and one that risks severe bodily harm, and the killing must be necessary to prevent it. The set of circumstances in which you can kill someone in self-defence is pretty narrow and being loose with the wording of the law in this way is wildly misleading.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
I don't disagree. I'm asking whether we know that that's what she was accused of and whether she was in fact doing that. I know a little more than I did at the time, and so I can see what the basis for that claim is, but I'm still not sure the extent to which that was actually confirmed.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
He didn't stand in front, he wasn't in front until she reversed.
There's no contradiction there. He got in front while it was reversing and then stopped in front of it.
And cops are absolutely allowed to stand in front of parked vehicles to keep them from fleeing.
The question is not about what they're allowed to do. It's about what they're instructed to do. Going against standard practice may be legal, but it is not reasonable, particularly if is aware of the dangers involved, as he would have to have been in order to believe his life was subsequently in danger.
I already addressed this in my other comment, but cops absolutely can shoot fleeing suspects if they reasonably believe they pose a threat to the cop or others. A lady whipping her car around with reckless disregard for the agents in order to escape (and, to the officer who got hit, with seeming intent to hit him) it is absolutely a justified shoot.
I agree with the first sentence, but I totally disagree with the later. It is not enough for the person to in some vague sense pose a danger. Driving at a low speed near others doesn't come anywhere close to the level of danger required to kill the driver. The threat must be one of imminent and severe bodily harm.
This idea that the police are justified in ending someone's life based on the remotest possibility of someone getting hurt is something I cannot understand.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
I don't think that's what we're talking about. We're not talking about a specific argument that implies that Charlie Kirk's killing was justified while Renée Good's killing was not. We're talking about a person who believes Charlie's Kirk was justified and has a different argument for why Renée Good's death was not. One need not expect to find the former persuasive at all for the latter to be worth considering.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
Are you being purposely obtuse here? You know why - because she tried to run him over with her car. It's on video. It's had been mentioned in this discussion dosens of times. How anybody engaging in good faith in this discussion could not know that?
I don't think she was trying to run him over. If she had been, why did she turn away from him? I can understand the argument that he didn't know that at the time he started shooting, but I can't understand the argument that she actually was trying to run him over.
The question is whether his false belief that she was trying to run him over was reasonable in the moment. It can only have been reasonable for him to go against standard police procedure and walk in front of a moving vehicle if he had a very strong prior based on the circumstances that she would not try to run him over. For that strong belief to have been immediately overcome the second she started moving towards him (something he should already have known she was about to do when she started backing up), it would take an enormous amount of information to update that. I don't see what happened for him to overcome that prior. He saw the car moving, he heard his partner yelling at her to get out of the car while she kept the doors locked and backed up. He had to know she was going to drive away. He stopped when she stopped, so he knew which way the car was facing. How could it have been such a big surprise when she started moving towards her that he immediately made the decision to shoot and kill her?
It can kill you for trying to kill them.
Not necessarily. The belief that you're trying to kill them must be reasonable, what they do to try to stop you from killing them must be necessary to prevent you from doing so, they must not have provoked you, and they must have made all reasonable attempts to avoid the situation.
You are being purposely obtuse again by making it sound like only one second of the whole event happened and other events, immediately preceding and following it, did not, while you perfectly know they did.
Everything I know about what preceded the event made what he did less reasonable. For example, the fact that he knew she was uncooperative, the fact that he deliberately and recklessly put himself in harms way, and the fact that she seemed calm and not aggressive towards him. What do you think happened that supports his self-defence claim?
We are discussing a specific event, and you keep purposely ignoring the actual circumstances of the event, while making theoretical statements.
You keep making overly general statements that do not apply in many circumstances and don't apply here for the reasons I've given. It is not generally true that the police have the right to kill people who threaten their lives. Initiation of violence does not on its own justify a violent response from the police, especially not a lethal one.
I think by this point it is clear you are not interested in discussing the particular event, but interested in extracting something like "since there could be a theoretical situation where police shooting would be wrong, the police can be wrong, therefore you just admitted the shooting is not justified!". I do not have any interest in this kind of discussion. When you are interested to discuss facts you may continue with somebody else.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your argument, but you keep making general statements to support your argument without addressing the particular details that I bring up that show why those statements don't apply, which indicates you think those are generally applicable statements. But they're not. You can't just fall back on a general rule when I bring up the details of this case if you admit that they are not general rules. The reason I'm bringing up hypothetical examples is to prove that the rule doesn't generally apply. It's not to avoid talking about this particular case. I'm showing that there are exceptions and other rules that apply and explaining how they apply to this case.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
No, I'm not. I'm reading
since it basically makes it open season for any given criminal who wants to blast their way out of a traffic stop or chase.
As
The police cannot shoot someone to stop them from fleeing.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
"Not trying to injure him" and "had no idea he was there" does not comport. If I'm in the driver's seat of a car and there is a pedestrian in my blind spot, and I move the car such that I would hit them, but I don't know that they are there, do you think it matters that I wasn't trying to injure them? I think an analogous situation is if I am firing a gun with my eyes closed, or pointing the gun in a direction I can't see.
You're making a common mistake I've seen people who defend the shooter make. The lack of reasonableness in her decisions does not make his decisions more reasonable.
I absolutely agree that she was driving recklessly and had she hit him, she'd have been at fault. But that, if anything, undermines the self-defence claim. He needs to show that she intended to run him over. If she isn't paying attention and he ought to know that, then that makes it less reasonable for him to believe she is trying to kill him.
Why is he to blame for information he didn't know (that she didn't want to injure him), while she doesn't take any blame for information she didn't know (that he was standing there)?
She can take plenty of blame. Her being blameworthy has no bearing on his self-defence claim.
The reason he takes blame for information he doesn't know is that he cannot just assume that someone is trying to kill him. The belief needs to be based on something. Given that in the vast majority of situations where someone is driving towards you, they're not trying to kill you, the less information he has about her intentions, the less reason he has to think she is trying to kill him.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
The argument is not that he can only shoot her if it is guaranteed to stop the threat. The argument is that if it isn't reasonable even to think it might have stopped the threat, then his self-defence claim falls apart.
Keep in mind that to be found not guilty in court, he would have to prove a reasonable doubt based on the joint probability of a series of facts. He would have to show, at least to a level that generated reasonable doubt, that it was reasonable for him to put himself in front of a moving car, that he reasonably believed the car was headed towards him and risked severe bodily harm or death at the time of each shot that contributed to her death, that he didn't have time to get out of the way, and that shooting the driver of the car was necessary to prevent that severe bodily harm or death. If it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that at least one of these facts is false, his self-defence claim falls apart.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
Doesn't matter. It may be a bad idea tactically, but it does not lose him his legal or moral right to self-defense. You can draw your gun when a bad guy has his gun trained on you, and I would consider that unlikely to stop the threat, but that doesn't mean you're not defending yourself.
Of course it does.
The intentional taking of the life of another is not authorized by section 609.06, except when necessary in resisting or preventing an offense which the actor reasonably believes exposes the actor or another to great bodily harm or death, or preventing the commission of a felony in the actor's place of abode.
Shooting her wasn't necessary in preventing the offence because it cannot have prevented the offence.
Each shot is justified by the same reasons as the first one is justified because humans do not make decisions that quickly. We are talking about a time frame of 1 second.
I'm not sure what to say other than I think it's absurd to suggest people have reaction times that are that slow. In that second he was able to track the vehicle as it turned and away, maintaining his aim as his line of sight moved from the side of the windshield over to the side of the car. The only thing his brain needed to process was the fact that he was at the side of the car. I don't think it takes anything close to a full second to visually process where an object is.
If it really were split seconds, then I would buy this argument, but I've watched the video many times and I think he had lots of time to process the situation. I don't even think the first shot was justifiable, so he only had that much more time to process the second shots. It's not the case that once the first shot was justifiable, the subsequent shots are automatically justfiable if they are close enough together. Each shot needs to be justified based on the totality of the circumstances, which includes the amount of processing he had done before the firing of the first shot.
I just think this requires a remarkable amount of leeway for how slow his processing is allowed to be to say he was justified in firing at that point, but I'm not sure how to prove that.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
Blasting out of a traffic stop is not the same as driving a vehicle at a police officer. Police officers don't normally stand in front of vehicles that have been pulled over. So if someone were to drive away during almost any traffic stop, the law absolutely prevents police officers from using lethal force to prevent that.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
I'm defending anything that she did. I just don't think it's relevant.
Anything about him walking in front of the car... They were arresting her, what else were they supposed to do? Politely ask her from 10 feet away and say darn when she speeds away?
Standard practice would be to approach the driver's side window and politely ask her to step out of the car. Even arresting her was not reasonable. She was blocking a lane of traffic. It's not a big deal. Just give her a ticket.
I'm not saying any of this is legally necessary, but they should have been more tactful about the whole thing. There are a lot of videos of ICE going around where they are unnecessarily aggressive with people. That is naturally going to make situations like these more dangerous.
But regardless of what they were trying to accomplish with her, no, it is absolutely a stupid idea to stand in front of the car. That accomplishes nothing. The only reason one could give for doing that would be to prevent her from leaving. But that's only reasonably if you are highly confident that she's not going to run you over, which completely undermines any self-defence claim. And even in that case, police officers are told not to do that because it's dangerous.
Anything about him walking in front of the car... They were arresting her, what else were they supposed to do? Politely ask her from 10 feet away and say darn when she speeds away?
I don't really understand what point you're trying to make. That's absolutely a preferrable outcome than what happened. So are you saying that it's better they kill her than let her get away? It isn't legal for them to do that, as frustrating as it may seem. Minnesota does not have the death penalty for evading arrest.
So, while I don't think that they needed to approach from ten feet away and do nothing when she fled, if you genuinely think that and killing her were the only two options, I don't see how that justifies killing her.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
The intentional taking of the life of another is not authorized by section 609.06, except when necessary in resisting or preventing an offense which the actor reasonably believes exposes the actor or another to great bodily harm or death, or preventing the commission of a felony in the actor's place of abode.
It is not enough for there to be a reasonable belief of an offence which exposes the actor to great bodily harm or death. The killing must be "necessary in resisting or preventing the offence".
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.065
A person defending themselves is not necessarily required to re-evaluate after each act. The three shots were fired within one second, during which he was hit by the vehicle. This applies to civilians in anti-gun states, even -- it was a point in the Bernie Goetz trial.
That isn't true. The person must continuously evaluate whether the threat is still there. Everything is based on the reasonableness standard. If the time was so short that it the person did not have time to reassess and notice that the car had passed, then he would not be guilty, but the permissibility of the first shot doesn't automatically excuse all subsequent shots. One second is enough time for him to notice the car passing. He had to be looking where he was shooting, especially as a police officer and would have to have seen that he was shooting through the side window. He had to turn his body to track her in order to aim the second and third shots at her. If he can process all that enough to successfully land those shots (assuming they contributed to her death), then he can make the conscious decision to stop shooting. He doesn't have to think about it carefully to figure out that a car driving away from him isn't a threat. It should be intuitive.
It's not as though the car had gone from heading right at him during the first shot to turning away within one second. Before he took his first shot, I would say about half a second, the car had already started turning away. He took his first shot from the side of the car, with most of his body well out of the cars path.
By the way, it does not appear that he was hit by the vehicle. There are a couple videos where it seems like he might have been. There is a low-quality video from far away where it's hard to make out what's going on where it appears he might have been pushed by the vehicle. But if you line it up in timing with the video from back of the car, you can see that that can't be what happened because at that moment, his torso well to the left of the car. It's already passing him by. What must be going on is that he's farther back than it appears he's pushing off with his hands. You can see in another video that he leads forward and onto the roof of the car, but that his torso is largely clear.
The cell phone video makes it look like he was hit, especially if, like many people, you think it's body cam footage. But you don't actually see anything at that point. You hear the car collide with the phone. It's probably just his hand holding the phone landing on the car. There is actually no way to tell from this video whether his body and the car make contact, because the phone is facing the sky at that point.
Even if true, this would not defeat self defense.
It absolutely would. Police officers are specifically trained not to deliberately put themselves into situations where lethal force is the only option. If a police officer goes against his training and then decides to use the time he could have used to get out of the way to pull out his gun, then he is not acting reasonably.
It is a general rule that the legal excuse of self-defense is available only to those who act honestly and in good faith. The rule requires (1) the absence of aggression or provocation on the part of the slayer; (2) the actual and honest belief of the slayer that he was in imminent danger of death, great bodily harm, or some felony and it was necessary to take the action he did; (3) the existence of reasonable grounds for such belief; and (4) the duty of the slayer to retreat or avoid the danger if reasonably possible.
https://law.justia.com/cases/minnesota/supreme-court/1967/40004-1.html
Glassnoser
1mo ago
Assault with a deadly weapon is by definition a threat of bodily harm! That's what the word "deadly" means!
Assuming you mean severe bodily harm, which is what is necessary to justify responding with deadly force, no, it isn't. A deadly weapon can be used in a way that isn't deadly. If I hit you on the leg with a gun with moderate force, that is not a threat of severe bodily harm. To claim that killing me was self-defence, you need to have reasonably feared that I was going to commit severe bodily harm.
A lot of these arguments seem like attempts to find loopholes to find excuses to justify killing people. That's not how the law works. You can't say that technically a car can be used to kill someone so technically if someone does something that is technically assault, that somehow all adds up to a justification of killing the driver, even when no rational person would think that was necessary to protect the person being assaulted from severe bodily harm.
That's not to say this is as clear cut a case, but you absolutely do need to be able to show that in this particular situation that there was a significant risk of imminent severe bodily harm. If the car was not going very fast, and at the moment the shots were fired was turning away while the officer was clear of the car's path, then it is not an imminent threat of severe bodily harm.
Placing someone under arrest is not grounds for that person to assault a police officer, no matter how much that person feels they have been provoked, because police are legally entitled to arrest lawbreakers.
I didn't say it was. You're missing the point. If the cop unreasonably escalated the situation and put himself in harms way, then he can't claim self-defence even if there was an imminent threat of severe bodily harm. You are simply ignoring the elements that are required to make a self-defence claim, assuming the right is much broader than it really is.
Correct, the law permits you to resist an offense that you reasonably believe exposes you to death or great bodily harm. Landing an aircraft is not an offense. Intentionally driving a car into a police officer is an offense.
OK, suppose the aircraft were committing some minor offence like landing without permission. That wouldn't change anything.
The car did not move until he had already been in front of it for several seconds, and he was seen by the driver (thanks to new footage released today). He did not place himself in front of a moving vehicle.
He started walking towards before it started moving. Before he got to it, it started backing up. He went in front of the car after it had started backing up. He continued to walk across the front of the car and stopped the moment the car stopped backing up, turning to face the car. He could have avoided this by not walking in front of the car while it was backing up, as police officers are trained to do. After making the mistake of going in front of the moving car, he could have kept walking to get out of the way, instead of stopping in front of the car.
Because he is a human being and human beings do not process information instantly. The three shots were all fired within half a second, well within the amount of time it actually takes a human being to process a change in the situation.
I just don't buy that it takes that long to notice that the car is no longer in front of you. I think that's plenty of time, and as a police officer, he should be trained to react quickly. If he can't manage that, he has no business pulling out his gun. It's his responsibility to assess the situation and determine whether he is capable of managing the situation with a gun.
He switched his phone his phone before walking in front of the car, seemingly preparing to pull out his gun. Then he stopped in front of the car and turned to face it while pulling out his gun before the car started moving. So he made the decision that he would use his gun to stop the car if necessary ahead of time. If he thought he wasn't sufficiently skilled to decide moment by moment whether it was appropriate to shoot, as the law requires, then he shouldn't have put himself in that situation, which again, goes completely against police training.
If he hadn't been standing in front of the car, there would have been no risk to himself, and there would have been no perceived need to kill her. So the fact that he felt threatened was his own fault.
He stopped firing when he realized the threat had passed.
That's not the legal standard. The legal standard is whether he stopped firing when he should have realized the threat had passed, which was before the first shot and certainly before the second and third. Remember, the car was already clear of him after before the first shot. He had to lean forward and to the side to maintain his line of sight. Had he just stood upright, he wouldn't have even had a clear shot through the windshield.
Courts do not require independent legal justification for multiple shots within a small amount of time for this reason, the three shots would be treated as a single event in court because to a human being, they are.
I don't think that's accurate. What I've read says that each shot must be individually justifiable.
Because the law says you are permitted to use lethal force to resist an offense you reasonably believe exposes you to death or great bodily harm.
But it's not resisting if it doesn't help stop the threat. The use of force itself has to be reasonable given the situation. This is precisely one of the reasons cops are told not to do this, because it's well known that it doesn't work. The law does not allow police officers to gratuitously kill people for no benefit just because they are threatened. That would be absurd.
The law does not require you to spend what you reasonably believe may be your last moments on earth basing your decision to resist your death on whether it in retrospect might be futile or not. It permits you to resist by whatever means are available to you.
That isn't accurate. It absolutely does require you to base your decision based on what a reasonable person would do in that situation. Of course, it allows you to make mistakes that are reasonable given the limited time to make a decision. But if you're doing something police officers are told not to do and that any reasonable person would intuitively understand isn't going to work, that is going to severely undermine your self-defence claim. The basic concept of inertia is not alien to the reasonable person. It's not unreasonable for a police officer to except a large moving vehicle to continue forward due to momentum. This is common sense. It doesn't require a degree in physics.
You're right. It was a bad example. The point is that it is possible in principle to use what can be a deadly weapon in a way that isn't a threat of severe bodily harm. Comparison to guns are bad because guns are specifically for killing people. If someone pulls out a gun on a police officer or uses it in any way to attack him, that can reasonably be interpreted as as threat on his life.
A car is nothing like that. 99.99% of the time it is not being used a weapon.
That isn't the only information available to him. He has the prior that virtually all cars are used for transportation, not killing. He has the fact that she was not exhibiting any threatening behaviour towards him. He has the fact that she was turning the car away from him and that he was clear of the car by the time he shot. He has the fact that he should have been aware that she did not know where he was going to position himself once she had stopped reversing and that the initial direction of her car was intended to facilitate her escape, not to hit him. The only piece of information that he had to support the idea that she was trying to kill him was the fact that she made a quick decisions after only seeing him there for a split second to start her drive in his direction. I don't think that's sufficient evidence on its own to support his belief. And it is especially weak considering that by the time he took his shots, she was turned away from him.
It does, because it dramatically reduces the risk. Someone walking down the sidwalk might have a bomb hidden inside his jacket. That doesn't justify killing him. The police do not have the right to eliminate all possible threats to their lives.
By standing in front of the vehicle, and by pulling out his gun.
The threat has to be imminent. You can't shoot someone because of speculation about what they might do in the future. It's far safer to wait and see what actually will happen. If there is so much uncertainty about whether that initial movement forward was an attempt on his life, then it's much wiser to wait a moment and confirm that before attempting to stop a hypothetical second attempt.
You don't have to wait until you have the benefit of hindsight, but you do have to be conservative and only shoot when the threat rises to sufficient level and you do have to wait until the threat is immediate. You also have to take other options to get out of harms way if they are available to you.
I'll have a read later, but that goes against everything I've read about the relevant law.
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