I’m certainly not on the cop’s side on this one. She appears to have fucked up royally. I’m glad she’s being prosecuted. I hope she’s convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence. I just didn’t want to jump the gun on that whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing.
I’m reasonably confident that they would not have hesitated to arrest him, were the roles reversed. That’s unfortunate, and I dislike that I’ve read so many stories of police misconduct and their thin blue wall that our default assumption here is that the cop is getting special treatment, but in the grand scheme of things, 3 days doesn’t appear to much matter to me. They ARE pursuing charges, which is an improvement over some “police shootings”, so perhaps this isn’t the one to get all outraged about police misconduct on. Just a thought.
Extreme fatigue can mimic drunkenness quite effectively.
Does Castle Doctrine only apply if it’s really your own “castle”, or also if you mistake someone else’s castle for your own?
Because if the latter, that’s an enormous loophole.
No shit. Anyone could break into someone’s home, shoot everyone in it, then claim they thought they were in their own home and were defending themselves. Granted, they’d have to have some semblance of a coherent and/or plausible reason for claiming this but still.
The affidavit says that “upon being asked where she was located by emergency dispatchers, Guyger returned to the front door to observe the address and discovered she was at the wrong apartment.”
She didn’t know her own address?
How long had she been living at this apartment building? Because the only way I’d believe any answer for why she didn’t know her own address other than she was higher than a kite/drunker than doorknob is if she had just recently moved in. Just having moved in might explain why, after coming off an exhaustive shift and being dead tired, she may have been disoriented as to where she was in the building and mistook the victim’s place for her own. As well as not knowing her address, etc.
I read only a few months. I’m not sure where I read it though.
I suspect when asked by the emergency dispatchers it was the first time she looked around and realized she wasn’t in the right apartment. Then she walked to the front door to confirm where she actually was. It doesn’t excuse any of her actions, but it could explain this narrative.
I didn’t see aceplace57 suggesting otherwise. Yes, she’s got to face trial for her actions, and accept the consequences if she’s found (or pleads) guilty. Jean has had his life taken from him, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a tragedy for the officer, too. She will live a long life with the knowledge that she stupidly killed someone. She’ll never be a cop again. She’ll be a felon, which will severely crimp her career options. She’ll never be allowed to legally own a gun again.
You’re assuming she gets convicted.
Is it a fifteen hr shift? Or a 12hr shift with some down time after, where maybe she had some drinks? That’s a pretty easy thing for the police services to cover up I suspect. And if they’re already invested in spinning this, falsifying the drug test result would be the natural next step, dontcha think?
Maybe it’s wrong to be this suspicious. But so many recent police shootings, which saw cops walk away without conviction, AND the silence from the rest of the force, in such cases, naturally results in people always being highly suspect of police transparency.
Heroes don’t stand silently by and watch bad police skate. They don’t get it both ways. If they want to be trusted then more transparency and less spin is required. If they don’t start soon no one will EVER take the police at their word or give them the benefit of the doubt, in future?
It’s well known and acknowledged that the Dallas Police Department is understaffed and overworked- there are regular newspaper articles and TV news stories about it. There was basically a pension fund snafu a few years back brought on by the fund managers’ mismanagement and a sweetheart deal for the cops, and when the city & state fixed it, a lot of older cops bailed.
Combine that with pay that’s not quite up to the standard of the surrounding towns, and a tougher work environment than many of them, and it’s not a surprise that DPD has trouble recruiting new cops.
Based on what I’ve read, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that she really did work a 15 hour shift. One article I read said that due to understaffing, there were a total of 3 officers available during the day for the entirety of central Dallas.
If you google “Dallas police understaffed”, you’ll find dozens of articles about it.
What’s irking me about this are two things:
One, that the usual shit-stirrers are trying to make this into a race-related issue, when no signs point that direction. This is NOT an incident in the same vein as say… Michael Brown’s shooting.
Two, this sort of pre-emptive conviction in the court of public opinion. What we should be hoping for is a fair and open trial for Guyger- she deserves that. Instead, we’re getting calls for “justice” that are thinly veiled calls for a guilty verdict and implications that anything else is unjust. This bothers me- we (as the public) only know what the news has told us, and that’s incomplete. And it’s not our place to be deciding someone’s guilt or innocence based on that. That’s the job of the jurors, attorneys and judge.
And Ambivalid, have you never gone on autopilot when you’re tired and done stuff you haven’t really been thinking about? I mean, I’ve been really tired in the past and driven halfway to my previous job before I realized I was going the wrong way. And about a year ago, I stood at my previous job (of 9.5 years!) standing there shaking my keychain at the badge reader like I would have at the job before that. Hell, yesterday I got off a floor early at work because I wasn’t paying attention. Autopilot. I can totally believe someone could not notice what floor they parked on, especially if there weren’t reserved spots, and thus go on the wrong floor and go into the wrong apartment. I mean, how often do you check the room number or address to make sure you’re in the right place at your own home?
My personal suspicion is that this was a horrendous series of unfortunate mistakes- she worked a really long and stressful shift, she got home, parked in the wrong place, and didn’t notice she had the wrong floor. Jean had left his door not completely latched, so when she inserted her key, it opened. She’s suspicious, goes into a dark apartment (still can’t easily tell it’s not hers) and sees a person in there. She yells at him, and in his bewilderment, he probably either yelled back or froze. She shoots, still not realizing she’s not in the right apartment.
That’s an entirely plausible sequence of events to my way of thinking. Doesn’t excuse anything, but it’s a lot more simple than thinking there was anything more going on.
It also doesn’t meet the standard for murder; in Texas at least there are 3 levels of homicide- murder, manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. (https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.19.htm)
Murder: “intentionally or knowingly causes the death of an individual”
**or **“intends to cause serious bodily injury and commits an act clearly dangerous to human life that causes the death of an individual” or “commits or attempts to commit a felony, other than manslaughter, and in the course of and in furtherance of the commission or attempt, or in immediate flight from the commission or attempt, he commits or attempts to commit an act clearly dangerous to human life that causes the death of an individual”
Manslaughter: “recklessly causes the death of another individual,”
Criminally negligent homicide: A person commits an offense if he causes the death of an individual by criminal negligence.
Say what you will, it’s likely NOT murder. Intent is probably not clear. So they’re going to charge her with manslaughter, because that’s the charge they can probably best prove. To put it a different way, if they were to charge her with murder, she’d probably skate because the prosecution would have a hell of a time proving intent.
As a spokesman for middle class White Suburbia, I would suggest significantly greater than half of us don’t trust the cops already. I would assume the less privileged among us are even more wary of them. These days you only call the cops if you want to document some trouble (i.e. a burglary yesterday, or a car accident if you have time to wait around for them to get there) or if you want to start some trouble. Only a great fool calls the cops to restore order. Because as a group they practice as a gang, protecting and serving themselves first and foremost.
Seems to me, firing a gun at someone, in the dark, at close range, is intentionally or knowingly killing someone.
The part you are glossing over is the part where she shoots and kills a man for not obeying her. I’m not convinced that is legal. Even if she was on her own home. As I pointed out earlier, she was not on call. What about her story, as she relates it, warrants killing someone?
That’s not intent, at least not in the legal sense. She didn’t go into Jean’s apartment with the intent to kill him from what we know. And, from the other information we have, she tried to de-escalate with whatever verbal commands there were. That also casts doubt on her having had intent to kill him.
In other words, if you go into what you think is your own place, and find what you think is an intruder, and you try and resolve the situation through verbal commands, that is evidence that you did not intend to deliberately murder him, even if you end up shooting out of a perception of self-defense. It’s that deliberate intent that matters in this case, not the innocence or guilt of the victim.
cgg419, that’s just a stupid statement. By that criteria, anyone who shoots at anyone would meet the criteria for murder, even if done in self-defense. Intent means that you deliberately intended to murder that specific person.
I subscribe to this view as well.
And as we know, when police “de-escalate with verbal commands”, civilians call it “screaming obscenities at you while pointing a gun at you.” If some random stranger barges into your house in the middle of the night and screams something like (imagining here based on known videos of police confrontations) “show me my fucking hands or I’ll fucking kill you”, I’m sure you feel all calm and de-escalated.
Well said.
WTF does that have to do with intent to murder anyone? My point was that it does show an intent to resolve the situation in a way other than shooting, which is kind of the exact opposite of intent to murder someone. Hence manslaughter instead of murder.