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Okay – so if it's not so rare, it shouldn't be difficult for you to find an example which is at least broadly comparable to this one, but with reversed racial dynamics. It doesn't have to be an altercation between two strangers: surely it shouldn't be difficult for you to find an instance in which two male friends of different races (or even two female) got into a fight, the non-white one was clearly more severely injured, but the police arrested him rather than the visibly less injured white party. There must be tens of thousands of hours of publicly available bodycam footage out there, and I'm confident that woke people would be screaming the house down about racial profiling if an event like this had transpired. But despite claiming that Henry Nowak's case isn't especially unique, you can't come up with even one example with the racial dynamics reversed. How strange.
Sure I'll go check a chatbot for another example than the one I gave and doublecheck to make sure it's not hallucinating.
It gave me (with edits to cut out fat).
Double check and yep it seems to be real.
Here is a video recording of the McGlockton shooting. It clearly shows that McGlockton is the aggressor. If you disagree, I would be quite interested in hearing your argument as to why.
Sure it's really easy! He was investigated and charged by a Republican state attorney in Florida and a jury of his peers in Florida found him guilty after looking at all the evidence, the specifics of the legal statutes he was charged under, and his best arguments in defense.
Then upon appealing
So there you go, he's guilty.
It's honestly impressive how far you're willing to go on occasion to avoid having a thought.
Did the Republican Florida state attorney also not have a thought? The Florida jury members? The Florida appeals court?
Seems more likely you're upset they disagreed with you.
Drejka cannot be the aggressor, because McGlockton initiated their altercation with a brutal physical assault that caught Drejka completely unawares and laid him prone on the ground. This does not mean that Drejka was subsequently justified in shooting him in response; it was a very iffy shoot, and as I argued at considerable length at the time, Drejka's conviction was an acceptable outcome. It's actually a fairly interesting case, and I reference it often to provide illumination on the subject of personal defense with firearms.
Drejka's subsequent conviction and its justification are irrelevant to the point at hand, though, which is that Drejka was not the aggressor, which is one of the criteria you were looking for when selecting this example.
So this is exactly what was wanted.
White guy shoots (basically equivalent, argubly worse if anything to a stabbing) a black guy illegally.
Police are on the scene and they take his self defense claim as legally legitimate and do not arrest or charge him.
Republican state attorney handling the investigation believes the evidence is enough to convict and prosecutors take it to trial.
At trial he is found guilty by a jury of his peers.
At appeal, the conviction is upheld. His claim was not legally legitimate.
A guy who was legally guilty of manslaughter was not arrested on the scene originally.
If the Wiki article is correct, no. They arrested him "Drejka cooperated with deputies on the scene, and was transported to the North District Station in nearby Dunedin, Florida, for further questioning by detectives", then released him the day after, citing the surveillance video. Meanwhile, the black guy wasn't arrested, but rushed to the hospital. So it's not at all what was wanted.
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