Let’s not mince words. Suspected criminal = average citizen.
My thing with the police is not how many people they kill, or who, or from what part of town. It is that in cases where they are clearly in the wrong, where I might get murder 1 and possibly a botched injection, they remain protected, paid, and their career remains intact.
Alternative tactics and preclusion are always brought up in deadly force situations and most of the time rejected.
In other words, all the district attorneys and grand juries in those cases when presented with everything involved are wrong and you are right.
Got it!
I agree. Temper justice with mercy.
And I would agree that the probation be strict. No going on talk shows, lecture circuits, news shows, no books, no interviews, no articles, no letters to the editor from her, nothing. Maybe some electronic monitoring.
But this is not a case where the convict needs to be hammered.
Yup. Way too many cases where innocent people, or crazy people, end up dead because the police officer thought a cell phone was a gun or something. One of those lives is worth the life of one police officer, to the extent you can ever compare lives.
So long as she’s never allowed to touch a gun again.
I think she should serve whatever is typical for manslaughter. Every case of manslaughter is a mistake. She seems averagely guilty for having committed manslaughter, imo.
Unless she gets a pardon or her full civil rights restored (both very rare in a case like this) that’s exactly what a felony conviction does.
Or at least it’s supposed to. As discussed in other threads felons in possession of firearms are routinely treated with kids Gloves.
ETA: Heh. My auto correct had it as kiss Glocks. How odd.
Well, I’m disappointed. Man 1 seems excessive.
Man 2 is more appropriate.
Hopefully there’s a chance of a successful appeal.
I can’t see how society benefits by putting Potter in prison for twenty or more years.
There’s no chance she would ever handle a gun again. Felons can’t own or even be around guns.
It sends a terrible message to our police. Make a mistake under high stress and go to prison for a significant portion of your life. I wouldn’t work any job with a legal sword dangling over my head. Hell no. There’s too many other jobs right now. Employers are begging people to return to work.
Oh, me too. I 100% believe she didn’t mean to kill him and that she feels crushing guilt over it. But the man is dead regardless, so the charges are appropriate.
I agree - and the discussion upthread trying to parse whether she feels more sorry for herself or more sorry for her victim is pointless. For a non-psychopath under these circumstances, I think it’s impossible to untangle the two.
I don’t think twenty years is appropriate, but I think a long prison term sends exactly the right message to our police.
Why obviously?
If a bystander had tackled Derek Chauvin in an attempt to save George Floyd’s life, causing Chauvin to hit his head on the pavement and die, might it be judged justified?
Okay, but I think that’s a very rare scenario.
I’m much more inclined to question whether 98-99% of shootings by police are really justified. This is quite old, but I think it raises all the important questions:
So you agree that there’s a problem there?
That’s the sword that dangles over most peoples’ heads. Most of us, if we make a mistake that results in someone’s death, will in fact have our lives ruined. To which we respond by trying really hard to not make that kind of mistake.
It’s relevance is that in this case the police are dealing with a person who has a warrant for his arrest who is acting in an uncontrolled/dangerous manner. Daunte Wright ramped up the situation to split-second decisions with his behavior.
People have a general expectation that professionals (regardless of the field) are superhuman beings when they’re really just people.
Simply ignoring my prior rebuttal does not make it go away.
For this to be relevant, it would need to be true that lethal force was a possible justified option, and that Potter was deliberating between gun and taser, and that this contributed to her mistake.
Potter herself does not claim this. Potter herself took into account Wright’s record and Wright’s proximate actions that you describe, and she determined that the taser was appropriate. So far as I’m aware, neither she nor her defense team has ever claimed that she contemplated deliberate use of lethal force.
Yes, Wright created a tense situation where a taser was justified. When would it ever be otherwise? A taser is never required in a calm situation.
It seems like there could be more stringent guidelines about when police are authorized to chase down someone like that. I don’t buy the reasoning that the car is a “deadly weapon” in the hands of someone who’s just trying to flee the scene, and has no cause to drive like a maniac unless pursued.
Maybe one simple fix would be for police to carry a pair of spiked chocks, elbow-shaped, and fit them under the front and rear side of a wheel when a traffic stop is initiated. If the suspect flees, the tire is destroyed and the wheel is jammed, so the car is no longer a high-speed flight risk.
This is a very big country. Unlikely events are bound to happen to somebody.
No, the message is you can’t wrongfully kill someone and get out of it with an “oopsie.” History shows that warnings have no effect on them, jail is the only language they understand. So this is a perfectly good message.
This actually describes many jobs. Not just police. The military works under more stringent rules of engagement than police, and they manage just fine. At jobs I’ve had in the past, I could have gone to jail for making an error on certain reports or sending an ill-advised email. It didn’t make me a nervous wreck, it just made me more judicious and thorough. If a cop wielding deadly force can’t be bothered to cultivate that same attitude, I’d love to see them downgrade to a job with less responsibility.
Unfortunately, outside of policing, there are very few jobs that afford so much power with so little responsibility. So most bad cops are going to keep being bad cops until they go to jail. That’s why we can never stop holding them accountable or listening to their excuses about how it’s so hard not to kill citizens.
I have zero problems expecting that professionals will be professionals. As has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread, police are trained and trained over and over for situations like this. Their training leads me to hold them to a higher standard than the average armed citizen.
I would also expect a medical doctor to be better at doing doctor things than the average first aid kit toting citizen.
If you are claiming to be an expert, I fully expect expert performance in your field.
[Taking off on what @JaneDoe42 said, and trying to self-edit, here]
It is notoriously difficult to get an attorney to take a legitimate medical malpractice case:
More than 450 attorneys were surveyed for the Emory study, “Uncovering the Silent Victims of the American Medical Liability System,” which found that three out of four medical malpractice attorneys reject more than 90 percent of the cases they screen. The study found:
- About 95 percent of patients who are harmed will find it extremely difficult to get representation.
- Almost no attorney will take a case, even when the chance of winning is 95 percent, if the damages are less than $50,000.
- More than half refuse any case, no matter the likelihood of winning, if the damages are less than $250,000.
States like California long ago enacted legislation that limited medical malpractice liability. Passed in 1975, it limited non-economic damages (eg, pain and suffering) to $250,000 and it was not indexed for inflation.
Meaning: $250,000 in 1975 would have been over $1.3M in 2021, but the $250k cap is still current.
At the same time, there is a never-ending push by the American Medical Association to rein in medical malpractice cases (SOURCE - 33p PDF).
Accountability is checks and balances. The AMA doesn’t want accountability. Not many systems or industries do. But the public needs to demand it from government employees, our society, large systems, and powerful institutions.
In so many ways, it really is about the powerful and the powerless.
“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
This is just what ‘bending’ looks like. And it isn’t always painless.
+1
When you have the foxes judging what other foxes do to chickens, nothing will change. They can’t demand to be paid and treated as professionals and then act with careless disregard for other people’s rights and lives.
I am not going to get started about RICO laws, too much of a hijack…