The risks are high but the odds of the risks creating actual danger are lower than people think. Statistically I’m far more apt to croak of a heart attack than I am getting shot. And in fact, only slightly fewer police officers die in on the job automobile crashes than get shot.
The real odds of getting hurt come from things that seem less severe than someone trying to shoot or stab an officer. In 33 years nobody has ever shot at me. But there have been a lot of people who tried to physically assault me.
The definition of felony assault requires substantially less than beating someone to death.
You seem to have a peculiar definition of crime, where all criminals are murderers. That’s not realistic.
You also seem to think that police only deal with “criminals,” that is, felons, that is, murderers? Of course none of those narrow definitions is the case. Police deal with suicide threats, and misdemeanors, and infractions, and lots of things which are not felonious, not necessarily violent, and not a threat to their lives. The* vast *majority of the time.
So, a killing that’s not motivated by a motive like money, love, nor vengeance isn’t a felonious homicide? Since when? I wasn’t aware that lack of motive made killing legally A-OK. :rolleyes:
Yeah, some of these guys should be prosecuted for reckless endangerment, manslaughter, or negligent homicide rather than murder. But then again, some of them were acting way outside the lines when they shot a civilian, and a rare few might even be indictable for “felony murder,” which is when you really didn’t mean to kill anyone, but they died as a result of another crime you were committing.
I feel like you were engaging in a couple of extremely silly sophistries in this post.
Sigh. No. If you go to a jury, you want to tell them “motive means & opportunity”- you need to tell the jury *why *the nice Police Officer killed the man. Just saying “he did” doesnt buy you a guilty verdict.
So, when you take one of these fuck-ups to a jury as a DA- what do YOU tell them is the motive?
That’s where many of the police shooting cases fall apart. We know the cop shot the guy, but the question is WHY? So unless you can impute* worse things to the cop than “he panicked and shot out of fear” then your case is dead.
Happens time after time.
and then prove, which is harder.
And- unless the cop is serving in the military, he’s a “civilian” also.
If I understand correctly, Michael Brelo was acquitted because it could not be shown that his shots were specifically the ones that killed the suspects.
Do we know that the two unarmed men were killed by bullets, and not like a heart attack or something? If we do, we know that one or more of the cops did in fact shoot and kill the suspects. This looks like if you just get enough cops involved in the shooting that none of them can be convicted of anything. If a group of people collectively beat a person to death, do none of them get convicted of murder because no one can tell which specific blow actually ended the victim’s life?
Why doesn’t some variant of the Felony Murder Rule apply here? A getaway driver can be prosecuted and convicted of a murder committed by his accomplice, a crime he did not commit. So why can’t a group of cops be convicted of the killing of a suspect if you can’t figure out which specific bullet did the killing, but you know that one of the bullets fired did?
For one, the charge was never murder - it was manslaughter.
For two, it’s not as simple as “We don’t know who fired the killing shot, so they all go free” - the judge found in his ruling that Brelo, and the other officers, had justifiable cause to use deadly force based on their understanding of the situation at the time.
ISTM that appeals are more likely to be succesful than GJs to not indict by several orders of magnitude.
IANAL, but FWIW my guess is that you need for the entire group to be engaged in a crime for that rule to come into play. It’s not like any time you’re part of a group in which one guy commits a crime that all are guilty. So if a bunch of guys are shooting someone with legal justification and one guy is shooting without legal justification, the other shooters can’t be charged on that basis. (By contrast, if the whole group is robbing a bank then all could possibly be responsible for the actions of the one shooter.)
A felony murder conviction requires you to show the accused was participating in a felony at the time the murder occurred. You’d have a hard time showing evidence that the police intended to commit a crime when they began chasing the car.
You have maybe been misled by police procedurals. “Motive” is not an element of murder. You can kill somebody for literally no reason and still be guilty of murder.
Bullhonkey. Murder is specifically the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Murder, much like a mortal sin, requires intent. If one unlawfully kills another in a non-malicious manner, the crime is manslaughter, not murder.
It is when the possibility that the defendant had a perfectly legal reason to shoot is there, such as nearly all police shootings. " intent to kill" is part of most murder laws.
