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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.
Which one?
There are several problems with this argument.
You cannot intentionally kill them. But if they are an imminent deadly threat, you are allowed to shoot them. Once they are no longer an imminent deadly threat, you are not allowed to shoot them anymore. If you shoot them during the window of time in which they are an imminent deadly threat, then any consequences to the bad guy are not really any of your concern. So yes, you can kill them, but you cannot intentionally do it. However, in the moment, whether your bullets will actually kill them is completely unknowable, and also not something you should care about if you are facing an imminent deadly threat. That's why we talk about using force, such as ordinary force or deadly force. We don't talk about killing, and the fact that you are saying "killing" screams to me that you fundamentally misunderstand self-defense law.
Your last sentence, "If you can stop the threat without killing someone, you cannot kill them" also seems to be confusing different levels of force. Yes, if someone is merely an ordinary threat, you cannot use deadly force to stop them. If someone is pepper-spraying you, for example, you are not allowed to shoot them. However, I've established that I'm talking about a deadly force scenario, i.e. a man pointing a gun at you. There is no such law that says that if you can stop him without using deadly force, that you must do so (besides duty-to-retreat states that mandate you must retreat if you can do safely, but it's not clear that can be done here). He is a deadly threat, so you can respond to him using deadly force. It's that simple.
Are you saying that a coffee mug is able to stop a guy who's pointing a gun at you?
But my point still stands. If your response to a deadly threat is ineffective or futile, that doesn't mean you lose the claim to self-defense.
He could have, but with a short time frame for him to respond to the threat, it's unreasonable to expect him to pick that option at the drop of a dime. Humans don't think that quick. Are you familiar with the OODA loop? It takes time to observe the threat, orient himself to it, decide his course of action, and then act on it. If he was thinking about multiple options, it takes time to decide between them, but it's highly likely that -- since this happened so quickly -- he wasn't even thinking about moving out of the way. He literally made a split-second decision. This is why I continue to think that you're viewing this situation with 20/20 hindsight. You keep ascribing more ability and knowledge to him than what a reasonable officer put in the same circumstances would have had.
I disagree. The totality of the circumstances points in his favor. You (and others) keep raising many different arguments that are just invalid by themselves. I don't seriously think that he's innocent just because of one refuted argument, I think he's innocent because he did almost everything right and his conduct reflects the elements of lawful self-defense.
I do not think that a self-defender has the right to assume the absolute worst case scenario. There are, however, certain assumptions they may make depending on the circumstances. For example, the quintessential example of the robber pointing a gun at you. You are allowed to assume that he is willing to shoot and kill you. You can even assume that his gun is real and that it's loaded. Yes, there have been many cases where a bad guy points a fake gun at someone, gets shot by a good guy, and dies. The good guy is 100% in the clear, because to any reasonable person, a fake gun looks as real of a gun as any.
You can make the argument that assuming the robber has a real and loaded gun and is willing to use it is assuming the absolute worst case scenario, and you would be right, because robbers don't usually use (fake) guns to kill, they usually use it for intimidation. But in this case, it's fine to assume the absolute worst case scenario, and to shoot him in self-defense.
It depends on the circumstances. A vehicle that is completely stationary and not moving throughout the course of an interaction? There is no argument in the world that it could be a deadly threat. A vehicle that is accelerating towards you, though? A completely different story.
No, what counts as lawful self-defense is determined by the totality of the circumstances. Training and standard procedure may factor into it, but it does not determine it alone. Chauvin kneeled on a man's neck for several minutes, when he wasn't a deadly threat, and when it was unnecessary for him to do so to restrain him. That alone would violate the law regardless of what training and standard procedure say, and his situation is completely opposite to a quick, seconds-long encounter where an officer faced an imminent deadly threat and was forced to make a split-second decision to respond to it.
You then list several things that are irrelevant, are things he could not have known, or ascribe greater-than-human ability to him, all of which I (and others) have already gone over with you. Again, I still think you're operating with 20/20 hindsight.
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