Bland committed suicide. The sheriff did not kill Bland. The police at the holding facility did not kill Bland. Bland’s family did not kill Bland by refusing to bail her out of jail.
p.s. The internet does not create the laws of Texas.
Might well be an improvement, but Xeno did not suggest any such thing.
He will - which is the problem.
It’s great that you let us know what is the law, and it’s nice to have the analysis.
Not mad at you specifically, rather mad that he will be able to use “bullshit” to tapdance around the fact that he behaved atrociously under the protection and direction of an amoral lawyer. (yes, lack of morals - only guided by what the law allows)
Doorhinge, since you seem to have eyewitness information as to the exact events that occurred are you willing to appear as an Amicus Curiae for the Court and help to bring this case to a close? Please, American Justice needs your expert testimony.
Right, I’m aware. That’s not where I’m hung up. Here’s how I read the escalating stop from watching the video a few times.
–He pulls her over for failure to signal a lane change. This is a legal detainment.
–He allegedly has zero plans to arrest her, but let her off with just a warning.
–Returning back to the car, with the warning papers to be signed, he decides to ask “if she’s okay. She seems irritated.” [paraphrasing]
–She rightfully tells the truth. Blunt, sure, but not really rude or disrespectful.
–He switches to a non-sequiter with the cigarette request.
–Her refusal seems to visibly bother him.
–He orders her to step out of the car.
–She says no and begins to freak out a bit. During the ensuing struggle, he says “I gave you a lawful order!”.
So, there’s my question. Was the lawful order in asking her to step out of her car? If so, wouldn’t that be the initial grounds for her arrest (ultimately escalating to the point of resisting, then assault)?
The problem is he was embarrassed to say “refusing to get out of the car when I commanded her” and knew it was wrong. So he was discussing it and looking up in his manual immediately subsequent to figure out just what to say.
Even a cop like this would or should be humiliated at having this ordinary event turn into what it did.
Ok. So he flubbed with the “lawful order” to step out of her car, and then decided to the default of “I’m arresting you because I can. Yay for me!”?
Yes.
Well, to be clearer, the “lawful order” was not a flub. Since he had probable cause to make an arrest, the order to step out was indeed lawful.
You sound as if you are in favor of lynch mob law and street justice.
Everyone is entitled to the protection of the law, regardless of your personal opinion of the law, lawyers, and police officers.
Who told you he was embareassed to say anything? Did you read it somewhere or is this simply your opinion?
Yes, I am. I’m counting on you to make it happen. I’ll wait here.
I want to talk for a moment about this attitude.
First, I’ll remind you and others reading that I said:
So I’d like to distinguish two different scenarios here.
Lawyers, like all other human beings, come in many stripes of temperament. A prosecutor has a dual duty – to zealously advocate for the state AND to do justice. So it’s fair for you to decry what I described above as an amoral action, because that hypothetical prosecutor would be placing his zealous advocacy for the state above his mission to do justice. Most prosecutors I knew would not do this; many, however, certainly would. So your concern in this example instance is not misplaced.
But I sense that your concern was more broad than that, primarily because you characterized it as an amoral lawyer, rather than an amoral prosecutor. I sense you meant to include Encinia’s hypothetical defense lawyer.
And it’s that conclusion that I dispute.
In our system of adversarial justice, we have rules. We ask the defense attorney to be a zealous advocate for his client, within the bounds of those rules. Now, this necessarily means that members of the defense bar will end up zealously defending people that are factually guilty – they will be working hard, with all their training, talent, and experience, for the goal of avoiding or blunting criminal and civil consequences for their morally undeserving clients.
But their task is not amoral. As a society, we realize we lack a reliable method of conclusively determining what happened in the past, out of our view. So we’ve designed and accepted this system, in which two zealous advocates vie in front of a neutral tribunal. We hoe that the truth of the matter will be the tipping point that allows the wrongly accused to go free and the rightly accused to be convicted, but we also accept that some number of rightly accused will go free as the sieve is shaken. This is the price of honoring our goal of vanishingly seldom, if ever, incarcerating the innocent.
So this is our system. And a key piece of that system is the defense attorney, who is not free to substitute his own moral convictions for his duty of zealous advocacy. To do so would be to betray the role he has agreed to serve. In essence, we have asked him to suspend his own agency of moral action and accept instead the canons of ethics with respect to assisting the guilty.
I disagree that such a person can fairly be called amoral.
Hmmm… Well, in the sequence of events posed by cmyk above, the step “Ordered her out of the car” is actually preceded by another step – “REQUESTED she exit the car”. (See the transcript which has been quoted several times.)
I get that being required to exit one’s vehicle is legal and can be applicable with or without an arrest, under certain conditions. But initially he didn’t “require” her to exit, any more than he “required” her to extinguish her cigarette. Instead he requested it. Each step (ask how she felt, ask her to extinguish the cigarette, ask her to step out) can be viewed as confusing to Bland and simply ramps up the pointless futility of the encounter.
Frankly I’m not sure how I want to rationalize this. Is the officer deliberately baiting her, provoking her into greater and greater resistance ultimately culminating in an arrest for a much more serious offense than the original arrestable traffic infraction? It sure looks like it.
On the other hand, maybe he is an insensitive, oblivious martinet, in awe of his own power. He couches his utterances as questions out of some distorted sense of politeness while relying on the weight of his official persona to convey the fact that his requests are actually commands. And he becomes genuinely agitated when this woman (did ‘woman’ matter? did ‘black’?) defies him, and finally forces him (in his own mind) to overpower and arrest her? (The abuser’s “Don’t make me hit you again, bitch!” psychosis?)
I’m sure it’s one or the other, but I’m not sure which. Either way though, this guy shouldn’t be a cop.
Concur completely.
Yes. Note that he thought he was pursuing justice. He suspected that the perp was a sassy black ho, and prodded her to produce evidence that his suspicion was correct. Justice served.
Did you have any evidence that race was involved, or was that just a random accusation?
Regards,
Shodan
Didn’t you know? septimus is psychic.
Anything bad that happens to a black person is always due to their race, haven’t you been following these threads?
Alas, the more I learn about US criminal courts and the outcomes of their deliberations, the more I have come to appreciate that the operative word here is ‘goal’. Outcomes are, of course, are very different matter.