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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
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.
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.
https://law.justia.com/cases/minnesota/supreme-court/1967/40004-1.html
This is the special police officer use of force statute, not the regular self-defense one (which also applies). However, the conditions here are satisfied, since fleeing a peace officer (609.487) is an offense and shooting, while it may not have prevented him being hit, did stop that offense.
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