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Not immediately executing someone for doing something is not the same as allowing them to do it.
How it could be any other way is that the police don't stand in front of vehicles to try to stop them from driving away and if they drive away against police orders, they can use a number of other safe techniques for pursuing and arresting them. Standing in front of cars and shooting the drivers is way down the list of preferred options for stopping vehicles and was easily avoidable in this situation.
Okay. Let’s say they let her go and then go arrest her later at her house. Can they use force to arrest her there? What if she resists? What if she runs away? Is force / obstruction never permitted?
If it is permitted, then we need to explain why it was impermissible here
I didn't say force was impermissible here. I said killing her was impermissible. He wasn't trying to use force to arrest her. He shot her in order to kill her.
On what grounds do you assert this? He shot to stop the threat. Once the threat was over, he stopped shooting. If he for example had waited a bit and then fired (unjustified) shots later, it would be a clear indicator of murderous intent, but that's not what happened. Once deadly force is authorized, you are allowed to keep using it until the threat has passed. Whatever consequences result from your use of force is not something to care about in the moment (although police are trained to render first aid once the suspect is in custody).
That might have been the intent, but it was unreasonable because it could not have stopped the threat.
No, he didn't. He fired two shots from the side of the car when he was completely clear of its path and it was moving away from him.
But it never was authorized and he continued after the threat was passed.
Reasonableness applies to whether it was reasonable to believe that she was a deadly threat at that particular moment, and it is applied to whether the response was proportional (e.g. you cannot shoot someone who merely pepper-sprayed you), but at no point has it ever been applied to whether it could have stopped the threat. Even in a gun-on-gun situation it is not guaranteed that a gun will stop the threat. See my other reply here.
As for the rest, we are talking about a time frame of 1 second and humans are not expected to make perfect split-second decisions in such a short time frame. See my other reply here.
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.
Again, there is no law that says that it must be reasonable to think that your response would have stopped the threat. A guy is pointing a gun at you, and you throw a coffee mug at him. You can throw your phone. You can throw your pen, or call him obscenities, or kick dirt at him. All of those things are legally justified, because once you are faced with an imminent deadly threat, basically everything is allowed (besides things that could cause harm to innocent people), up to and including your own deadly force.
Now obviously, it is not reasonable to think that you throwing a coffee mug had any chance of stopping him, and in no universe could a coffee mug have come even close to ending the threat. So does that mean that your self-defense claim falls apart if you throw the coffee mug, and you could be charged with assault? That doesn't make sense to me.
The car was stationary when he was walking around it, but you seem to have had this discussion already with StableOutshoot.
So I want to focus on a different point, which is that you seem to be assuming that the officer knew or should have known that she was going to move her car in that way, justifying your argument that he could have simply just stepped out of the way. This is an argument that can only be made with perfect 20/20 hindsight. And we do not judge use of force with hindsight, ever. It is extraordinarily difficult to predict, in the moment, which path a vehicle is going to take. I can agree that (just to give an extreme example) if a car is normally driving down the street in a straight line, it would be dumb for an officer to jump out in front of it and expect the driver to stop. But that's not what happened here. The car was stationary, then moved backwards and that's when the officer walked in front of it. Is that a bad tactical decision? Probably. But it would be unreasonable to expect him to know that she's now going to go forward, especially given that this all happened so quickly. In general, drivers who are non-compliant are very unpredictable and can easily maneuver their vehicles in whichever direction they want. If you view things with hindsight, you can always make an argument that the officers could have avoided "putting themselves in harm's way".
Yes, there is. That's what it means for something to be necessary to prevent the threat.
No, that is not correct. Not everything is allowed. It must be necessary to stop the threat. If you can stop the threat without killing someone, you cannot kill them.
It's a bad example because throwing a coffee mug could help.
No. If he was able to recognize the threat in time to take out his gun, he could have moved out of the way instead.
It's not that difficult. I grant that it may be somewhat difficult. But I don't think you appreciate that the evidence against him is cumulative. If the entire case against him hinged on him judging the direction of travel of the car, then I would agree that he should not be found guilty. But there are too many problems with his self-defence claim. The fact that he probably should have recognized which way the car was going is just one of a number of problems, all of which need to be overcome in order for him to claim self-defence.
You seem to think that he has the right to assume the absolute worst case scenario at every point in order to justify self-defence, when in reality, the totality of the evidence needs to rise to a certain level.
No, it wasn't unreasonable. She was obviously in the middle of a two part turn. Why else would she be backing up?
He doesn't even need to know which way car was going to go. He just needs to recognize the possibility that she would try to drive forward and that should have been enough for him not to walk in front of the car, as he was trained not to do.
As we saw at Derek Chauvin's trial, what counts as reasonable behaviour for a police officer is determined by what his training is and what the standard procedure is, both of which if violated at multiple points.
Then what was he doing standing and blocking the car?
It's not relevant what we know in hindsight. What matters is what he should have known in the situation. He knew that he could have not stood in front of the car. He knew that he could have kept walking to get out of the way. He knew that once the car started moving he could have stepped to the side. He knew that shooting the car didn't have any chance of stopping it. He knew that shooting through the driver's side window when the car was passing him (which we now know was where the fatal shot was taken from) did not prevent any threat. And he knew any possible threat was gone by then.
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