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Notes -
By the way, this is another example of what I mean. If Good was simply trying to get away, it's not relevant to the guilt or innocence of Ross, and yet the blog post brings this up. Of course, it seems pretty clear in hindsight that Good was just trying to get away. So that raising this issue is fundamentally no different than bringing up Good's (alleged) criminal history: In either case, the person is using evidence which is arguably irrelevant at trial in order to make their side look better and the other side worse.
I think it's also worth noting that police and prosecutors very much use peoples' criminal history in deciding who to investigate and who to charge with a crime. And this is a big part of the reason such evidence is typically inadmissible at trial -- because it's already been taken into account by the system.
Is this exculpatory evidence? I don't think so. If it were, then every criminal who starts running from the police "because they got scared" would then have, at the very least, a get-out-of-evading-arrest-free card to play at all times.
Non-compliance with law enforcement orders has to remain chargeable. Otherwise, we get into a situation in which subjective interpretations in the moment bear the same evidentiary weight as objective facts. Again, I'd recommend everyone watch an hour of police bodycam videos and not just the ones that result in discharge of a weapon - I mean basic traffic stops / drug possession chargers. You see a pattern after a while of the cop going through this process of information elucidation to begin to establish facts and intent and also to suss out obvious self-contradicting lies. They're doing this so that, should they need to testify later, their evidence and procedure is as tight as possible.
For narrative purposes, it certainly looks much better to say she was trying to get away than to say she was trying to run down the ICE officer.
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Not in the hindsight sense. The standard is whether a reasonable person observing what the officer did and within the time the officer had to evaluate would have perceived it as a threat. If that reasonable person would see that Good was trying to get away, then it wouldn't be legal to shoot her.
Chargeable, yes. Arrestable, absolutely. Deadly force, not without more.
The standard involves a reasonable officer, not a reasonable person, and the interpretation of that standard is very, very officer friendly.
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"Chargeable" and "punished by shooting" are different things.
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