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It looked more to me like he leaned towards the car. But even if you're right, he didn't get run over even though he was hit. Why not? Why is he folded over the hood and sidestepping instead of getting caught under the car? Because the car was going in a different direction. That is the key fact here. He planted his feet as she drove towards him and only started to move out of the way at the very last second. Then he walked away seemingly totally fine. Why would he have done that if there was a risk of him getting run over? He could see which direction her wheel were turned in. He could see where the car was going. Yet he stayed where he was and it worked out for him. It seems to me he knew exactly what he was doing and did not think he was about to be run over, or else he would have gotten out of the way.
It's not hindsight. It's his job. If he is going to stand in front of large vehicles and shoot their drivers, he needs to be able to quickly assess the situation. The whole scene was right in front of him. He could see her and the other officer. He knew what was going on. And if he is going to be carrying a gun and given special leeway to enforce the law with it, he needs to be held to a high standard for situational awareness, and if he felt at all not up to the task at any moment, he needed to take steps to reduce the danger he was putting himself and others in.
This is the problem with so many of these arguments defending police killings. The police are professionals who should know how to handle these types of situations and who deliberately put themselves and others into dangerous situations. They have a lot of control over the situation. They often don't need to be where they put themselves and don't need to have taken the actions that led them to the situation where they felt the need to use deadly force.
They're responsible for all reasonably foreseeable outcomes of the situations that they create. Yes, they sometimes need to quickly respond to what criminals are doing and they don't always have the option of just walking away. But they're supposed to know how to steer situations towards a reasonable outcome. Standing in front of cars when you don't know how to react to the car driving towards you is not something they should be doing.
This is like excusing a doctor from a killing a patient on the operating table because he cut open a patient without knowing how to sew him back up. Yes, of course, if you randomly find someone with his guts hanging out, you shouldn't get in trouble for not helping him, nor is it the doctor's fault that the patient is in need of the surgery in the first place. But when the doctor decides he is going to be the hero and do life saving surgery, he is responsible once he cuts the patient open. He is supposed to know what to do and if he doesn't, he needs to leave the patient alone and either find someone else to do the surgery or provide a different treatment.
He's responsible for standing in front of the vehicle. The doctor isn't responsible for the person getting sick, but he doesn't need to cut him open if he can't do that without killing the patient.
Look, exactly nothing from your wall of text matters here.
It is legally permissible to respond to an assault with a deadly weapon with lethal force. That's it. It doesn't matter where he stands, or how omniscient he is, or what he coulda-woulda-shoulda done according to a monday morning quarterback on the internet with the benefit of hindsight. She drove a car into him. That is assault with a deadly weapon. He is legally entitled to respond with lethal force. Case closed.
It's not legally permissible to respond to an assault with a deadly weapon with lethal force if there is no threat to bodily harm. Nor is it necessarily permissible if you provoked the situation. I can't run onto the tarmac of an airport and start shooting down landing aircraft with artillery because of my, at that point, reasonable fear that a plane landing on top of me is a danger to my life. It doesn't matter if I don't have time to get out of the way by the time the plane is about to land. It's my fault for putting myself in that situation. There are limits to what I can do to create a dangerous situation for myself that leave lethal force as the only option to save my life.
He knew or should have known that, if a car was driving towards him, he would shoot and kill the driver, yet chose to stand in front of a moving car. Then when the car did appear to be driving towards him, he failed to take the opportunity to get out of the way and instead stood his ground, drew his weapon, and then leaned towards the car as it turned away and fired at the moment the car brushed past him. Then he fired two more shots as the car drove away from him.
Even if we grant that the car was a deadly threat, how does that excuse firing twice after it was no longer a threat? How can even the first shot be justified when he knew or should have known that the killing not have stopped the car?
You have a right to kill someone if it is necessary to protect yourself. If shooting her didn't help him, then he had no right to do it.
Assault with a deadly weapon is by definition a threat of bodily harm! That's what the word "deadly" means!
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.
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.
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. You are straight-up lying here.
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. He stopped firing when he realized the threat had passed. 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.
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. It does not say "unless a guy on the internet with the ability to watch the video in slow motion thinks it wouldn't have helped anyway." 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.
No, you a permitted to kill someone to resist an offense which you reasonably believe exposes you to death or great bodily harm. The wording matters quite a bit.
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.
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.
OK, suppose the aircraft were committing some minor offence like landing without permission. That wouldn't change anything.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think that's accurate. What I've read says that each shot must be individually justifiable.
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.
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.
If you draw a firearm in the presence of a police officer you won't have the opportunity to use it as a club against him before he fills you with holes, and no jury on the planet would convict him. It's impossible to use a gun as a club against someone without first passing through a condition in which they would have reasonable cause to believe you might shoot them with it. Which seems a bit relevant here - All notions that Good's car did not pose a deadly threat are based on hindsight. The only information available to the officer at that moment was the fact that a car was accelerating toward him. There is zero legal obligation for him to wait until he has the benefit of hindsight to decide whether to shoot!
It does not matter how fast the car is moving, because you can fall under the wheel and be crushed no matter how fast or slow it's moving.
Okay, so, how exactly did the cop in question escalate the situation, especially unreasonably? He is just walking around the car and filming it. He doesn't say a word. Folks are saying his colleague escalated the situation by aggressively approaching the vehicle, but how does that weigh on the guilt of the shooter? It's absurd to suggest that you can violently escalate anything just by standing somewhere without saying anything.
Maybe it won't immediately stop the car, but it will prevent them from backing up and trying again. Again, with the benefit of hindsight we know she didn't intend to do that, but also again, you're not required to wait until you have the benefit of hindsight to deal with a threat you perceive in the moment.
The other theory at play is that it is legal for a police officer to shoot a fleeing felon if they reasonably believe their flight poses a danger to the community. This substack post goes over this theory in great detail, with many, many citations from case law, many of which are 9-0 or 8-1 supreme court decisions.
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.
Sure, but 99.99% of the time, a screwdriver is not a weapon, but when somebody raised one over their head at me and I drew a firearm to defend myself, I received exactly zero legal scrutiny about my decision to do so. It's actually not all that ambiguous that something has become a weapon, so don't pretend that it is.
My dude, my guy, my person. He was literally impacted by the vehicle and would have needed to jump out of the way to avoid being hit. The trajectory of the vehicle went directly through where he was standing. The car was accelerated in his direction. The position of his body and her vehicle were coincident. When you are struck by a vehicle you have been exposed to death or great bodily harm. Cars are normally not weapons? Doesn't matter, this car is impacting his body. The wheels are turned in some direction or another? Doesn't matter, it didn't steer the car away from his body. She didn't have intent? Okay, her lack of intentional control of her vehicle caused it to impact his body. There is no way you can slice this where she has not committed an offense which has exposed this officer to death or great bodily harm.
He didn't pull out his gun until the car was already accelerating toward him. Try again.
What do you mean it can't be ambiguous? Are you saying that you are absolutely certain Renee Good tried to run Jonathan Ross over with her car?
How do you know that?
I don't know what you intended to say here, but taken literally, it's obviously not true. You can be hit by a car a low speed and not be harmed.
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