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Nice Plant #7: Get me off of this planet

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Re: Nice Plant #7: Get me off of this planet

Kepler said:
They've had a lot of time to get their story straight. And, of course, Brown can't speak for himself. At the end of the day, exonerated or not, Brown's dead, and exonerated or not, Wilson's alive. That's the asymmetry that legal lethal force leaves us. If it's legitimate Wilson walks and vaya con Dios. But if it's not, the Court doesn't have the power to resurrect Brown.
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Sure, but you can say the same anytime any person kills another. Sometimes it's legitimate, legal self-defense, and sometimes it's not. Haven't seen the court resurrect any of THOSE victims, either.

The fact that one of the actors in this play was a cop is completely irrelevant.
 
trixR4kids said:
If you're shooting someone are you really trying to effect an arrest? Not sure if that is relevant here.
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The only other way the shooting is justified is self defense, in which case Brown would've been guilty of assaulting an officer or, at a minimum, disorderly conduct, thereby giving the officer the right to arrest him on the spot.

So you can be sure that section is highly relevant.
 
LynahFan said:
The fact that one of the actors in this play was a cop is completely irrelevant.
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While this is in fact true as the laws currently stand, I'm not sure it should be. I'd be all for increasing penalties for cops or anyone else acting inappropriately under color of law. Instead, we give them more leniency with things like qualified immunity which has been expanded way too much for my taste. (Again, that's just my opinion.)
 
Re: Nice Plant #7: Get me off of this planet

unofan said:
The only other way the shooting is justified is self defense, in which case Brown would've been guilty of assaulting an officer or, at a minimum, disorderly conduct, thereby giving the officer the right to arrest him on the spot.

So you can be sure that section is highly relevant.
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Right, I figured this was a case of self defense (and its legitimacy). Not sure you can really sure how you'd argue that you were using lethal force to try and arrest someone.

LynahFan said:
The fact that one of the actors in this play was a cop is completely irrelevant.
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This is a joke right?
 
Re: Nice Plant #7: Get me off of this planet

LynahFan said:
The fact that one of the actors in this play was a cop is completely irrelevant.
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I disagree. Police are given the right to exercise legitimate lethal force as protectors of the community. When a cop kills somebody on duty, we are killing that person. The private citizen on the other hand is only representing himself. If he kills, that is him alone killing. He has to pay the penalty, but he's inflicting personal harm, not social harm.

The difference means the community imposes a much higher standard of conduct on their representative. We are paying a policeman, in part, to enter dangerous situations knowingly and at personal risk. We're looking for danger. If the policeman creates or exacerbates the danger, that's hugely important -- it defeats the whole purpose of policing.
 
Re: Nice Plant #7: Get me off of this planet

unofan said:
While this is in fact true as the laws currently stand, I'm not sure it should be. I'd be all for increasing penalties for cops or anyone else acting inappropriately under color of law. Instead, we give them more leniency with things like qualified immunity which has been expanded way too much for my taste. (Again, that's just my opinion.)
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I look at it the other way. If .0001% of interactions with cops turn deadly (a "him or them" situation), given that I have less than 1 interaction with cops per year, that gives me about a 0.005% chance of dying early by cop. Cops interact with say, 10 people per day, 250 working days per year, so over a 40-year career, that gives him a 10% chance of dying at the hand of a citizen. Okay, my numbers aren't quite right, but you get the point - it is their job to insert themselves into dangerous confrontations day in and day out, so expecting 0% error rate over so many potentially deadly situations (and ratcheting up the punishment if they fail to achieve it) just does not make any sense to me.
 
Re: Nice Plant #7: Get me off of this planet

unofan said:
While this is in fact true as the laws currently stand, I'm not sure it should be. I'd be all for increasing penalties for cops or anyone else acting inappropriately under color of law. Instead, we give them more leniency with things like qualified immunity which has been expanded way too much for my taste. (Again, that's just my opinion.)
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In a weird sort of way, the events in Ferguson this past week plus cause me to slightly shift the other way. Here's why.

We ask the cops to stand between us and mob rule. It's not difficult for those of us living in the here and now to see how mob lynchings or "justice" occurred a century plus ago when there may only be a single sheriff or marshall on duty, and even then not standing in the way of the crowd.

What keeps the mob back is the understanding that we give cops guns, and the authority to use them. We give them the benefit of the doubt when they do use them. And we hire a lot of them.

I'm reluctant to join any effort to diminish that threat of force, without a clearer idea of what the consequences may be.
 
Re: Nice Plant #7: Get me off of this planet

SJHovey said:
I'm reluctant to join any effort to diminish that threat of force, without a clearer idea of what the consequences may be.
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In some of our major cities, there have been neighborhoods so dangerous (or buildings so dangerous) that the police wouldn't enter them.
 
Re: Nice Plant #7: Get me off of this planet

LynahFan said:
The fact that one of the actors in this play was a cop is completely irrelevant.
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Um, yeah, that has nothing to do with it at all. :rolleyes: Like the an occupation (read: character) of the accused never has any bearing on a trial or on a DA's decision to prosecute an alleged criminal.
 
Re: Nice Plant #7: Get me off of this planet

LynahFan said:
I look at it the other way. If .0001% of interactions with cops turn deadly (a "him or them" situation), given that I have less than 1 interaction with cops per year, that gives me about a 0.005% chance of dying early by cop. Cops interact with say, 10 people per day, 250 working days per year, so over a 40-year career, that gives him a 10% chance of dying at the hand of a citizen. Okay, my numbers aren't quite right, but you get the point - it is their job to insert themselves into dangerous confrontations day in and day out, so expecting 0% error rate over so many potentially deadly situations (and ratcheting up the punishment if they fail to achieve it) just does not make any sense to me.
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If there was no context I would be a lot more sympathetic to describing this as an actuarial problem. If it was simply a matter of, say, calculating the load on bridges and having a .001 chance of a bridge collapsing, and then one bridge collapses and we say, "well, sucks to be the guy who rolled a quint 6, but..."

But there is a historical context of harassment of minorities by law enforcement, not to mention the broader social context of racism. And there is the context of poor communities being pushed around by "the system" and not having the tools to stand up for their rights the way, say, affluent suburbs would. Both of those things suggests a lot more than random chance is involved here.
 
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SJHovey said:
In a weird sort of way, the events in Ferguson this past week plus cause me to slightly shift the other way. Here's why.

We ask the cops to stand between us and mob rule. It's not difficult for those of us living in the here and now to see how mob lynchings or "justice" occurred a century plus ago when there may only be a single sheriff or marshall on duty, and even then not standing in the way of the crowd.

What keeps the mob back is the understanding that we give cops guns, and the authority to use them. We give them the benefit of the doubt when they do use them. And we hire a lot of them.

I'm reluctant to join any effort to diminish that threat of force, without a clearer idea of what the consequences may be.
Click to expand...

In other contexts though, immunity farking sucks. There was a case I worked on as a clerk for a judge where the police ended up breaking a guy's jaw when they threw him to the ground. Everyone admitted the initial stop and search was illegal. But the cops said he tried to resist, and it's illegal to resist even an illegal stop, so he was charged with resisting arrest. Because the action occurred literally two feet outside the view of the dash cam, it was the cop's word against his, so he was convicted.

In the resulting civil suit, the cop pled immunity because the guy was resisting, but also that even if the guy wasn't actually resisting, the cop could have reasonably believed he was thus making the broken jaw ok. Personally, after reviewing the entire tape leading up to that point, I don't think the guy was resisting. But I still gave the cop immunity and granted the motion to dismiss. I hated doing it, and really wish I hadn't had to. I think that guy got screwed all around. The cops wrongly pulled him over, and he gets a broken jaw and a criminal record for it while the cop got off scot free after illegally initiating the entire thing.
 
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Re: Nice Plant #7: Get me off of this planet

unofan said:
In other contexts though, immunity farking sucks. There was a case I worked on as a clerk for a judge where the police ended up breaking a guy's jaw when they threw him to the ground. Everyone admitted the initial stop and search was illegal. But the cops said he tried to resist, and it's illegal to resist even an illegal stop, so he was charged with resisting arrest. Because the action occurred literally two feet outside the view of the dash cam, it was the cop's word against his, so he was convicted.

In the resulting civil suit, the cop pled immunity because the guy was resisting, but also that even if the guy wasn't actually resisting, the cop could have reasonably believed he was thus making the broken jaw ok. Personally, after reviewing the entire tape leading up to that point, I don't think the guy was resisting. But I still gave the cop immunity and granted the motion to dismiss. I hated doing it, and really wish I hadn't had to. I think that guy got screwed all around. The cops wrongly pulled him over, and he gets a broken jaw and a criminal record for it while the cop got off scot free after illegally initiating the entire thing.
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Did the cop get any punishment/sanction for the stop that everyone agreed was illegal?

If so, then it sounds like both parties were in the wrong and both parties were punished.
 
LynahFan said:
Did the cop get any punishment/sanction for the stop that everyone agreed was illegal?

If so, then it sounds like both parties were in the wrong and both parties were punished.
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I have no idea if he got an internal reprimand or not. To the best of my recollection, there was no punishment via the courts or another public forum.
 
Re: Nice Plant #7: Get me off of this planet

Had a friend that lives around STL (15-20 minutes from Ferguson) tell me that the Ferguson area has been ready to pop like this for a while, all it needed was a catalyst.
 
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