Category Archives: Law

A Callous Killing (Or Armed And Stupid)

“They could have tased him or shot him in the leg; they shot the man, he dead [sic]. They could have tased him.” The speaker is a man who is walking along, talking to himself [or “he self”], while filming his surroundings with a mobile device. Another man is meandering around, acting erratically. The latter appears more confused than menacing. The filmer passes the meanderer with no incident. Police arrive. The narrator gets increasingly agitated and distressed as it becomes apparent what could and would go down. He’s describing the events as they unfold, incredulous, genuinely in disbelief.

Police arrive. Wait hardly at all. Make no attempts to subdue the meandering man or talk him down. Then pump him full of lead. The officers proceed to cordon off the street, clearly to prevent the shocked witnesses, who are standing at a considerable distance, from assembling.

Mediaite explains that “St. Louis police put out this cell phone video” “in the name of transparency, following the outrage over the fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer last week.”

Now we know that some at St. Louis police are both dangerous and stupid. This callous, if transparent, killing does nothing to redeem the force.

WATCH:

Eric Holder’s Howlers About His Independence

Criminal Injustice, Law, Race, Racism

Eric Holder, Attorney General for black America, has been joking about the promise of a “‘fair and thorough’ investigation into the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.”

As he deployed “Approximately 40 FBI agents and some of the Civil Rights Division’s most experienced prosecutors to lead this process,” he continued to tout “the independence and thoroughness of our investigation,” at least four times in one “op-ed for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.”

Amid howlers like the unimpeachable independence of his Department Of Justice, Holder’s impetus is to racialize the incident: “We’re looking for possible violations of federal civil rights statutes.”

In case you doubt what he’s up to, Holder said this to his constituents at a community meeting in Ferguson: “I am the Attorney General of the United States, but I am also a black man.”

Don’t expect Pajama Media to look beyond the tit-for-tat of, “What if the Rioters Were White?” Nevertheless, what J. Christian Adams has to say about the DOJ is edifying; he has covered “the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division for years”:

Why does it matter that the DOJ unit that will investigate the Ferguson police is stacked with leftists and ideologues? Because anti-police biases of lawyers in this unit have resulted in gross prosecutorial misconduct against police officers.
United States District Judge Kurt Engelhardt issued this blistering 129-page opinion documenting prosecutorial misconduct by DOJ lawyers … As Holder moves forward in Ferguson, keep the documented misconduct of his lawyers in mind.

MORE.

Liberal Vs. Libertarian Response To Ferguson (Rand’s Just An Opportunist)

Britain, Intellectualism, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Racism

“Liberal outrage over what some see as racial injustice” vs. libertarian anger “that connects the perceived overreaction by a militarised local law enforcement to [a libertarian] critique of the heavy-handed power of government”: As expected, BBC News adopts a more analytical angle on the “unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer.”

Expected too is BBC’s take on the libertarian scene. As its libertarian stand-bearers, BBC News has chosen from the ranks of Beltway libertarians, conservatives and Republican congressmen and senators.

“The state is big and powerful and violent and can hurt you, whether it’s the FDA, the state prosecutor or the local police force,” writes Hot Air blog’s Mary Katharine Ham, concisely summarising the gist of this libertarian argument.
Breitbart’s John Nolte puts it a bit more sharply: “The media hate police but without them, who will ultimately force us to buy ObamaCare and confiscate our guns?”
On Wednesday night Congressman Justin Amash, a libertarian-leaning Republican embraced by the grass-roots Tea Party movement, tweeted that the news from Ferguson was “frightening”, asking: “Is this a war zone or a US city? Gov’t escalates tensions w/military equipment & tactics.”
One of the leading figures in today’s libertarian movement, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul …

In his response to Ferguson, as is his wont, Sen. Rand Paul managed to straddle liberal and libertarian narratives, vaporizing idiotically as follows:

“Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention.”

Rand is the very embodiment of political opportunism.

Trayvon Round II?

Crime, Law, Race

If the video of Michael Brown—the unarmed, black teenager who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri—roughing up and robbing a shopkeeper is authentic, Brown was no gentle giant; he was a brutal bully and worse.

The point being made by the entities Fred Reed dubs “talking heads with bargain-basement IQs,” however, is that the Brown captured by surveillance doing what seemed to come so naturally (intimidating and stealing) relates not at all to the Brown who got shot, because the cop who shot Brown knew nothing of the robbery in which the teen had partaken in the hour prior to his death.

This is not to justify the shooting, but to pose a question: Do we know for sure that the outed policeman did not get information over his car radio about a robbery in the vicinity?

The fact that the alleged perp (Michael Brown) knew he had committed a felony might well have changed the dynamics of the situation. If Brown had consciousness of guilt, he might well have acted in an aggressive manner; “done something an innocent person would not do.”

“The story smells,” writes Fred, who worked the cop beat as a journalist:

Reflect: Every white cop short of the orbit of Neptune knows that if he shoots a black, he faces dismemberment in the media, loss of job and pension, probable criminal charges locally by a publicity-seeking prosecutor, a well-funded civil suit that he can’t afford filed by surviving family members, and trumped-up federal civil-rights charges from an attorney general who doesn’t like whites.