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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.
A gun is not being used as a deadly weapon when it is shot at the range.
I can agree that deadly weapons are only deadly weapons when they are deadly. But that circles back to StableOutshoot's original point, which is that the car here is a deadly weapon being used in assault. If the car was stationary, for example, then it's not a deadly weapon. It doesn't matter that 99.99% of the time it wasn't used as a deadly weapon, if we're in the 0.01% scenario where it is in fact a deadly weapon.
If you're arguing that it was a deadly weapon but there was no threat to bodily harm, that just sounds like an incoherent, confused statement. Either it's a deadly weapon or it isn't, and if it is a deadly weapon, then that implies that it is a threat of bodily harm. So either it's both a deadly weapon and a threat of bodily harm, or neither. We don't go around calling everything in the world a deadly weapon just because it could be used as one.
This is the sort of argument that makes sense when considering which traffic policies to implement, not in a life-or-death self-defense scenario. It also just doesn't matter. He has the prior that someone driving at him means he's about to be seriously injured or die.
Doesn't matter. Many non-compliant criminals have become deadly threats to officers despite showing no aggression or threatening behavior.
No, he doesn't have any of those things. You're only saying those with hindsight and with assuming humans have faster reaction times than they actually do.
No, he doesn't have to think that she was trying to kill him. No officer has ever been required to argue that someone was trying to kill them, though it certainly doesn't hurt their self-defense claim. They just have to argue that someone was an imminent deadly threat. Intentions do not matter here.
When a robber pulls a gun on you, you have the prior that most robbers only use guns as intimidation tools. But you are not required to be able to justify the idea that he is trying to kill you. You are allowed to just shoot him.
The risk of falling under the wheels and getting crushed? Slow speed only reduces that risk if the driver is going to put their foot on the brake and stop, and the ICE officer has no way of knowing that she is going to do that. In fact, she was actually accelerating quickly and only moved little or not much at all because of the ice.
If he's fleeing or escaping, then it justifies shooting to stop him from fleeing since he is a deadly threat to others, per Tennessee v. Garner.
He pulled out his gun because she was an immediate deadly threat to him. And I fail to see how standing in front of the vehicle unjustifiably escalates the situation. She does not have the right to flee, after all.
No, it's not. That is a very bad tactical mistake. Thankfully, the law does not force you to wait in order to be sure that you have legal standing to defend yourself from a first attempt on your life.
This is just bad advice or easily misinterpreted. "Waiting" here implies that you know that there is a deadly threat but... you just can't do anything about it yet? Did you ever think through how a self-defender would actually perceive a situation as it unfolds? Either they see a deadly threat or they don't. If they do see a deadly threat, they are allowed to use deadly force as quickly as possible, until it is no longer a threat. There's no scenario in which the self-defender would think to wait just in case it's not a deadly threat. If a self-defender does wait, it's only for tactical reasons (e.g. waiting for the robber with the gun to turn his head away, so they can draw their own gun before the robber has a chance to realize they've done so).
Based on what? Officers have no duty to retreat, and even in states with such a duty to retreat for private citizens, you're only required to retreat if it can be done in complete safety.
My point is that that is not reasonable. He should have know that it was far more likely that she was just trying to drive away.
It doesn't matter. You keep trying to argue this as though the police have the right to assume the worst and respond accordingly. They don't.
Her behaviour was evidence of being non-threatening. He doesn't need abssolute proof that she wouldn't have hurt him in order to not be justified in killing him. No police officer ever has that. You cannot pull someone over for speeding and shoot them in the head just because sometimes people who get pulled over for speeding are dangerous.
You absolutely have to justify it. It's just very easy to justify. Someone driving a car in your general direction is not remotely similar in how threatening it is.
No, the risk of being killed by being hit by the car.
There has to be an actual risk to others. It can't just be hypothetical or else that would always justify shooting fleeing suspects, which we know is not allowed.
She does have the right to flee without being shot. He does not have the right to make it so that she cannot flee without creating a sufficient threat to him that he would be justified in shooting her.
It unjustifiably escalated the situation because she died as a result when he could have not gotten in the way. You say he pulled out his gun because she was a threat. He pulled out the gun before she started driving forward. If she was a threat with him standing there, why wasn't the alternative, what he is trained to do, of standing somewhere where she would not have been a threat, have been better?
It being a bad tactical mistake doesn't make the alternative justifiable. The police cannot take all precautions to protect themselves regardless of the risk to others. If that means that standing in front of a moving vehicle is too dangerous, then he always has the option of following the standard police practice and not doing that.
It isn't a bad tactical mistake anyway, because as we saw, he did not succeed in stopping the car.
Right. There is much less leeway when you created the dangerous situation for yourself unnecessarily. In order for him to stand in front of a moving car, he had to have a much higher bar for determining that there was a threat.
It's not binary. There are always low probability deadly threats everywhere. Their probabilities rise and fall continuously. He needed to wait until it reached a certain level before killing her.
That's what they're already doing 99.999999% of the time.
They absolutely do have a duty to retreat in some situations.
With him in her path? That means he was about to be seriously injured. In fact, he suffered internal bleeding as a result of the collision.
That is not what I am saying. My point was that her "non-threatening" behavior doesn't matter, when she in fact exhibited behavior that threatened the life and bodily integrity of Jonathan Ross, and was an imminent deadly threat to him.
Conversely, a man can be the most deranged person in the world. He can murder 50 people and shoot off bullets into the neighborhood. He can lead officers on a high-speed chase and crash several innocent bystanders. He can exhibit a motherload of threatening behaviors, is what I'm saying. However, if at the end of the chase he gives up, gets out of his car, puts his hands up and lets the officers cuff him? There is no way that the police are allowed to shoot him. Ever.
You have to justify that the robber was a deadly threat to you. You don't have to justify that he was trying to kill you, but it doesn't hurt your case to do so. You seem to think intentions (from all parties involved) matter more than they really do.
"General direction" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. I would use "general direction" to describe being maybe 10 to 20 feet away from a car. I would not use it to describe literally being next to it.
On a purely physical/biological/medical level, maybe. But on a legal/moral level? What I said still applies. He doesn't have to calculate what kind of injury he could be suffering before he can respond to a deadly threat. It doesn't matter if it that means it was less likely that he would die, the level of risk was already too high, because it's a deadly threat.
You said someone walking down the sidewalk might have a bomb hidden underneath his jacket. You need to clarify how much the police know in this situation. It's your hypothetical example after all.
If they don't know anything at all and have no reason to suspect him in particular over any other person walking down the sidewalk, then they aren't allowed to do anything, not even detain him.
If they have a reasonable suspicion that he has a hidden bomb, then per Terry v. Ohio, they are allowed to at least detain him at gunpoint and search him. If he flees rather than letting himself be searched, then Tennessee v. Garner applies.
No, she doesn't have the right to flee, period. Now, an officer may or may not have the right to shoot a fleeing suspect, but that's a separate discussion.
On what grounds? And anyway, it's not clear that he even intended to do that.
Self-defense does not operate on continuous probabilities. No self-defender is ever thinking "what is the probability of a deadly threat?" I mean, seriously, have you thought through what would go through a self-defender's mind in a scenario?
Let's say you're a clerk and a guy walks in your store. He's wearing a hoodie, a face mask and sunglasses. Well, it's a bit suspicious, but he's not a deadly threat. Then he walks over to the counter, maybe puts some cigarettes and beer on there. Okay, still not a deadly threat. And now let's say he pulls out a gun and points it at you. Now he is a deadly threat, and you are justified to shoot him.
There is no point where you as the clerk is going to think "he is a deadly threat, but I have to wait because... the probability hasn't risen enough yet?" At each moment, you'll either think "not a deadly threat" or "deadly threat." You may have suspicions from his hoodie and mask, you may even pay more attention to him, but until he pulls out the gun he is not a deadly threat, and you cannot pull out your own gun either.
Put simply, it's bad advice or easily misinterpreted advice to put "waiting" and "deadly threat" in the same sentence (with regards to the legalities).
Because 99.9% of the time there is no deadly threat that they can see. It wouldn't even register in their mind. When there is a deadly threat, often that's the first time they think about something being a deadly threat. At that point, there's no legal reason to wait, and it's bad advice to talk about being sure that you have legal standing or whatever before acting on a deadly threat.
Which ones? Which laws say this?
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