Yeah, that’s the more likely scenario. :rolleyes:
You should use the rolleyes when you’re being sarcastic. Or, I guess when eye witness accounts corroborate what reasonable people were predicting what the truth of the matter was, and that happens to undermine your position.
So wise, yet so pitifully, pitifully stupid. The Forest Gump of simians.
The deputy was asking them to provide identification and their response was saying “no” and shutting the door in his face. They clearly intended to prevent the officer from doing what he was attempting to do, get their identification.
They were operating under the assumption that once they took the flag down, the officer had no authority to request anything of them. What they forgot was the act of flying the flag that way gave the officer the authority to issue a citation, even if it would eventually be found unconstitutional.
Considering the eyewitness testimony, calling it “more likely” is being too kind. To be perfectly blunt about it it, it’s what happened.
Utter bullshit. If your arm were actually pinned in the doorjamb like a vise, it would be practically impossible to extricate it, as your hand is wider than your wrist. And if the door were slammed on his arm, it would have bruised it at the very least (broken some bones at the most), as I said. Have I ever cut my arm by scraping it across the smooth surface of a doorframe? No. Have 99.9999% of the population ever done so? No. I’m sure there’s an extremely remote possibility of such a thing happening, but given a choice between that explanation and the explanation that he deliberately broke the glass, which was seen by a witness, I believe the latter.
You think you can cut your arm by scraping it across a sanded and finished piece of wood, and we’re stupid? Yeah, whatever…
“Reasonable people” being you and Dio? Yeah, right. If the eyewitness had corroborated the cop’s testimony, how hard would you two be trying to spin it to make it support your knee jerk preconceptions?
Pretty damned fucking hard, I’d warrant.
That right there proves you’re pretty damn stupid when you damn well know that the vice is created by another human being. Are you honestly arguing that human skin can’t be scratched by wood?
In my dissolute youth, I once had a baliff come to a house I shared with some bandmates. The baliff was looking for one of my roommates who had a warrant out for skipping some court appearance (I don’t remember exactly what he was supposed to have been in court for. It was something minor. Parking tickets or something). As it happened, the baliff’s quarry was hiding upstairs in a closet. I told the baliff he wasn;t home. The baliff asked if he could search the house. I said not without a warrant. He gave me a message to give to my roommate (who he knew was in the house. We both knew I was full of shit) and left.
Was I preventing him from doing his duty when I wouldn’t let him in the house? If this couple did not know they were technically under arrest when the deputy was on their doorstep and did not know they were legally obliged to provide him with ID, I don’t think it can be proven that they knew they were resisting arrest.
Dio, I have to say that it is true, in my recollection, that you merely need intent to do the action involved, not intent to commit a crime, to be found guilty. I think the “willfully” in the statute applies to the action as well (i.e., he didn’t accidentally shut the door) rather than any knowledge of the criminality of the action.
BUT, goddamn, I hope this fascist bastard loses his job and has his ass sued off for this. His story smells, and in any case, all his supposedly legal actions are predicated on him trespassing on private property in order to prevent people from doing something they have every right to do. It reads to me like the deputy in question had a right-wing bug up his butt about people “desecrating” the flag, so he decided to act on a complaint the type of which is probably usually ignored (just try to get officials to take care of barking dogs, for instance, which are actually a nuisance that harms people), and due to his personal politics ran right over to enforce the sanctity of the flag with extreme prejudice.
And yes, that is my personal interpretation, not admissible in court, not infallible or certain, but decidedly based on the details in the story and my knowledge and experience of police officers.
If the witness had said he saw them slam the door on the cop’s arm, I would believe him. I might still have other issues with the deputy’s actions but I would drop the dispute about the door slam.
You misapprehend mens rea. The Kuhns did not think that they were not committing a crime (that they didn’t realize they were under arrest). They merely thought the arrest was invalid. They had the mens rea necessary for conviction on resisting arrest.
Sua
This is the second time you’ve left out the word “cut” when it’s convenient to your argument. But hey, if “you’re stupid” counted as a salient argument, you’d be kicking our butts.
I’d love to have a battle of wits with you, but you came to the fight unarmed.
Awright, smartass. Tell me how human skin can’t be “cut” by wood.
Eyewitness testimony is known to be very unreliable. Most of the people exonerated by the Innocence Project, for instance were convicted based on eyewitness testimony. Eyewitness Misidentification - Innocence Project
And see,
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dorf/20010516.html
http://www.truthinjustice.org/navy-study.htm
http://www.cbc.ca/disclosure/archives/031126_evidence/eyewitness.html
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LOFEYE.html
The Google shows that willfully has lots of definitions–some of which support your interpretation and some of which don’t. I didn’t find any North Carolina case interpreting this statute, so it’s not as clear cut as you make it out.
OK, add cuts, slices, lacerations, jagged tears and incisions to my previous post. Whatever. Human skin can be laid open by punching it hard enough or long enough with a padded glove, how much faster to you think a wooden door would do the trick?
Do you really there’s much room for uncertainty or ambiguity about whether the witness knows he saw the officer kick the door several times and then smash the glass? If it was question of the glass being broken simultaneously or very close to the time that door was closed, I could see rooom for a mistake, but this guys says the glass didn’t get smashed until long after the door had been closed and the deputy had made several attempts to kick it open. If he said he saw them slam the door on his arm, I would just accept it. The deputy is busted on his door slam story. Why can’t we all just agree to that and move on. It’s not the only issue in the thread.
What you say is true. However, biased eyewitness testimony is even less reliable. Say, testimony from an overzealous deputy who assaulted two harmless people in a fit of rage, then realized as he filled out the report that the incident was more likely to get him into trouble than them.
Moreover, you ignore the delicious irony of citing the Innocence Project to support the honesty, uprightness, and concern for justice of law enforcement officers. A frequent feature of exonerated innocents stories is the use of questionable testimony and coerced confessions by law enforcement officers more interested in getting a conviction than finding out who is actually guilty. Since a bone of contention in this thread is whether LEOs ever (gasp!) lie, I have to chuckle a bit.
Yeah… this isn’t actually a convincing point. Anything that can scratch human skin can also cut it. It’s just a matter of pressure applied. I really doubt there’s any nefarious purpose behind Monkey saying “scratched” instead of “cut.” For the purposes of his argument, they’re the same thing. Replacing one term with the other doesn’t alter the content of what he’s saying: the reasoning behind it is just as valid, either way.
I think it would be a hell of a lot easier with glass. Can you offer any reasonable argument as to why he could NOT have gotten the injuries from punching through the glass?
Plus we already KNOW he was lying about this. Somebody saw him. Continuing to defend him on this point is a waste of time.