Should officers with guns be present in the courthouse? Yes.
Should prisoners be within reaching distance of guns? No.
That would suggest that officers in close contact with prisoners should not wear guns, whereas officers involved in general courthouse security should wear guns.
It’s a matter of setting up and following an effective procedure that addresses these and a great many other courtroom security concerns.
Yep. This incident reinforces the administrative rule recently handed down from the presiding judge in the 6th Dist. of Cook County. Non-county LEO’s have to lock their weapons up before entering the courthouse. Courthouse security is still armed, and the officers manning the metal detectors and x-rays are still armed, but transport and random LEO’s, uniformed or not, can’t be. It’s a good plan, despite the officers’ bitching and whining about it.
This incident looks like a three-fold screwup;
A solo, female, armed guard transporting a subject with a violent history.
The subject was dressed in regular street clothes.
The subject was not handcuffed, even for transport.
Those are the things, IMO, that got those three people killed. No more, no less.
I tend to agree with Abbie’s concept, albeit awkwardly presented. This fellow isn’t going down without a fight. He killed to get out of court, he’ll likely fight with the same tenacity on the street, and in the process be more than likely filled to the brim with leaden goodness.
He’s going to have about one millionth of a second to surrender peacefully. If his little toe twitches, they’ll start firing. His best bet (assuming he decides to surrender, or has not already comitted suicide) is to walk naked into a police station with his hands up.
cnn.com has a breaking news banner: Customs agent found shot to death in Atlanta.
I just want to make sure of something. Other than the charges that he had not been found guilty of, there was no reason to suspect that this guy would do what he did? Had he done anything to warrant any sort of precaution?
And it looks like he may have struck again. Link. If this guy keeps it up, he might be better off making a last stand. Certainly doing his best to make sure that surrender is not an option.
Well, now they’re saying “no known connection”. Still, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
Totally agree. I fear that a female friend of mine took offense to this whe I pointed it out, but it seems to me, without knowing the size of the female correctional officer in question, that it would be across-the-board easier for a male to overpower a female, period.
On the question of guilty vs. innocent before the shootings? Irrelevant IMO because he was found, coming into the courthouse, with homemade knives in his shoes. Regardless of pending charges, that situation certainly warranted maximum security measures.
When he was arrested, it was by a 25 man SWAT team in full gear. He was a drug dealer who carried weapons. That was the police POV. In the eyes of law enforcement, there was a reasonable presumption that this person needed to be handled with extreme caution.
True, he had not been found guilty of this crime. However, he was not merely a “person of interest” in the matter. He was formally charged. And although the court must consider him innocent unless proven guilty (I hate the phrase “until proven guilty”), the police are obliged to use restraint adequate to the charge.
However, to non-law-enforcement (even the Asst. DA who was prosecuting him) he did not appear violent. Then again, neither did Bundy, who escaped from a courtroom when security got lax and the only remaining bailiff during a recess went out for a smoke leaving Ted alone in the courtroom. He jumped out the window.
This guy’s profile is emerging as a nice kid from a good family who couldn’t hold it together. He obviously had been hiding his violent streak for years, and probably had become highly frustrated and bitter after being unable to hold steady jobs as an adult. He reminds me of one of America’s few black mass murderers whose name escapes me at the moment – another nice kid who went on to terrorize New Orleans, burning buildings and shooting innocent people.
This was a re-trial, btw. The first jury was hung b/c many members found the charges so extreme they needed more evidence. The prosecution got it, and the general feeling was that this guy was going to prison for life.
Y’all,
He was found with one or two (depending on the source) homemade KNIVES, fashioned from shaven doorknobs or some such thing, in his shoes upon entering the courthouse.
I don’t care if he was facing a charge of teasing poodles and stealing lip gloss from Walgreens, the fact that he tried to smuggle weapons into a courthouse should have been a TIP-OFF, yes?
The prosecution wouldn’t even need to call witnesses. Their opening argument could be one simple sentence: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury – you know what to do.”
For those that do happen to be lawyers, how is a suspect such as Nicholls even legitimately defended in a trial that would be pure charade? He did the deed in front of too many people, so there’s no alibi. Any conceivable defense (possession by the Devil, an extraterrestrial “body snatcher”) would be contrived beyond reason. Does the public defender just clean his nails and doodle during proceedings, pausing only to declare “No questions, Your Honor.” every so often?
Well, he’s caught. As far as I can tell, there was some excellent police work going on in Atlanta.
Ooo-yes?
Link?
(Doing an under the circumstances subdued happy dance)
Got this ephemeral link: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&u=/ap/20050312/ap_on_re_us/courthouse_shooting_58
Or Google the headline “Police Capture Atlanta Slayings Suspect”
Btw, did anyone realize that putting the suspect in street clothes is not a matter of discretion from the judge? The suspect has the Constitutional right not to appear in jail clothes or cuffed in front of the jury because it presumes they are guilty. So they were about to put the cuffs on to transport him when he pulled this stunt. There should have been another officer in the holding cell.
To even insinuate this was a judge’s fault is beyond being ignorant.
Yes, someone did. This Year’s Model made the point earlier in this thread that the judge would not have been involved in decisions about how the prisoner was handled on the way to the courtroom and should not be blamed for errors by law enforcement.
What section of the U.S. Constitution is that in? I ask in all seriousness – I have always thought the defendant appearing in street clothes was a convention, not a constitutional right.
The OP has already conceded this point.
From what I can gather quickly, the defendant’s clothes during trial are not mentioned in the Constitution per se, but it apparently has become a matter of U.S. common law. From Wisconsin v. Reed (2002), Sec. 9:
Why would the decision say that courts are “inclined to allow a … defendant to appear in street clothes”, instead of saying that it is required by some authority?
Maybe if the defendant only owned a pair of underwear the state wouldn’t be required to buy him street clothes. Just a guess.