I don’t understand this. I thought that a tortfeasor was liable for actions that harm a particular person when those actions would not harm a normal person, but that LEO’s just get judged by “reasonableness” and “excessiveness”. However you mention an equivalent criminal law principle. Can you expand on that?
Why would I agree on your overall argument, when we both know the actual facts you attempted to use to prove it are not true?
The usual way things work is that, if the facts demonstrate what I said was true, that you should agree with my argument.
No, I agree with you on that point.
Which is exactly why I would contend that Garner and Rice make better cases - among other things, they were filmed.
Why do you keep saying that I don’t believe that these episodes are common? I believe the opposite of what you appear to think I believe.
My point was that, being common, any one of them could (and eventually would) be the trigger. It is mere chance that this particular one was (aided by the fact that, at least intitally, the account was so disgraceful and the police reaction so inept).
Without Ferguson putting this issue on center stage, eventually another such incident would. Which, for those of us who want the issues to be aired and to affect real change, I submit would have been preferable.
I was going to add to this thread by mentioning Kelly Thomas. One thing that case shows is that undue emphasis should not be put on the “choke hold”. (I put in the scare quotes because there is a difference between compressing the carotid arteries and the windpipe). AFAIK it was not a choke hold, but the officers sitting on Thomas that contributed to him not being able to breathe. Garner would have faced the same thing without the choke hold.
Then it is a very strange law in thirty-six other states.
Does it really strike you as “very strange” that so many states make it illegal to violently resist the police?
Getting into a physical altercation with cops is stupid. So is getting into a physical altercation with the Hell’s Angels.
The stupidity or otherwise of the action isn’t the point - the issue is whether after the fact a person should be subject to legal penalites for it!
Assume you have actual bad racist cops (presumably, you will admit such exist). Assume some make a habit, in some places, of simply arresting Black people and, when the cuffs are on - putting the boot in. A sort of “stay out of my beat” message. Then they dump their victims at the edge of town.
Now assume you are a Black man. You see a cop you know to be one of these bad, racist cops. You have done nothing wrong. The cop yells at you “Stop - you are under arrest!” and pulls out the cuffs. The cop isn’t even alleging you committed any crime. You strongly suspect he’s simply going to beat you up. So you push the cop away and run.
You get arrested. Under this law, you running - even if you can prove without a doubt all of the above - is “prohibited”.
This strikes you as fair?
Because (we think) he used excessive and illegal force in doing so. “You must enforce the law” does not equate to “anything you do to enforce the law is a-ok.”
Agreed, wholeheartedly.
We aren’t, if it’s an honest screw-up. I don’t think Darren Wilson should go to jail.
The Garner case, IMO, is at least arguably not merely an honest screw-up.
I’m not going to build a legal case here, since there’s no actual legal evidence, but I see negligent manslaughter in that video. I certainly see probable cause for a trial on charges of it.
YM obviously V
Because under this law the police are the ones breaking the law when they are being “violently resisted”?
To my mind at least, it is the law - not the uniform - that ought to be the subject of deference. If a person wearing the uniform is him or herself breaking the law at the time they are wearing it, they are not subject to deference any more than anyone else.
By way of contrast - here in Canada, it is well-established that one has a right in law to defend oneself against unlawful arrest.
A recent appellate decision:
The logic of this seems to me unassailable. If the areest is unlawful, the police are not acting within the scope of their duties, and so the special protections provided to police in law cannot apply.
Are you suggesting that the officer intended to kill Garner?
Yes, I know what the issue is. I gave my rationale for why resisting arrest should be illegal twice already.
Getting dumped off at the edge of town after being booted is not an arrest. Yeah, if you are in fear of this happening you should run. No, it’s not “fair.” There are bad people in the world and it’s not fair. In your situation you said you can prove without a doubt what would have happened. Then I’m fairly certain you won’t be charged with resisting arrest as what you described is not an unlawful arrest- it isn’t an arrest at all.
If extreme hypothetical situations are all you have to offer to persuade me that resisting arrest should be illegal, you’re going to fail at persuading me.
Your argument isn’t supported by me slightly overstating some numbers, though. Mike Brown, in your view, should not be the “cause celebre” because whatever happened to him wasn’t obviously unjust or egregious in your eyes. But if almost 30% of the board disagrees with this opinion, that supports my assertion that your opinion isn’t reflective of everyone’s and that the protests have been effective in making people who otherwise would be oblivious, aware and sympathetic.
Well at least we agree on that.
The optimist in me hopes that people who vilify Brown but are sympathetic to Garner are courageous enough to consider how video–or the lack thereof–can shape their impressions about an individual. Not so that they start requiring that there be video evidence for public outrage to be justifiable, but so that they become less susceptible to the cops’ narrative in the instances when abuse occurs and there is no video.
Because if Garner and Rice (and plenty of other stories) tell us anything, it’s that cops generally can’t be trusted to tell the truth when they commit homicides.
Because you’re acting like people have the luxury of sitting back and picking “examples” of things to complain about. As if people haven’t been complaining about these things for years and receiving a big cup of STFU.
100% cosign with this. This puts innocent people in a lose-lose position. The idea that a person can’t even exercise self-defense if a cop is physically battering them, lest they be guilty of resisting arrest, is too Orwellian to take seriously.
If it helps, here’s a Michigan case in which the rationale is briefly discussed:
However, I’ll correct myself above. The last time I looked at this issue in detail was several years ago. At that time, the case I am quoting above (People v. Wess, 597 NW 2d 215 (Mich Ct App 1999)) was good law in Michigan. Since then, it’s been overruled by People v. Moreno, 814 NW 2d 624 (Mich 2012). So contrary to my earlier claim, not all the states that still permit resisting an illegal arrest are in the South.
Not what I am commenting on. I am commenting on the notion that “resisting the cops is stupid”.
Yes, it is stupid. It is stupid mainly because you will likely be hurt. The cops are far more powerful than you.
However, this same “stupidity” applies regardless of whether the people attacking you are cops or not. Resisting anyone obviously more powerful than you is “stupid” for the same reason.
Huh? What’s the difference between “an unlawful arrest” and one that “isn’t an arrest at all”? An arrest that is not lawfully justified is “an unlawful arrest”, and up here in Canada, as I have posted, it is considered an “assault” and people have the right, here, to exercise self-defence against that assault. There is no need to prove that “it isn’t an arrest at all” (and how would they do that anyway?)
The hypothetical I provided is hardly an “extreme” as things like that actually happen - even up here in Canada (though here, the victims are more likely to be native Canadians and not Blacks).
Indeed, this is not really different from cases of self-defense generally. Yes, it is preferable for people not to resort to “self help” when bad shit happens. In a perfect world, they would not have to. However, the issue is whether - after the fact - they ought to be held legally liable for doing so. It is bizzare for the law to, in effect, reward wrongdoing and punish otherwise-legitimate self-defence, just because the wrong-doer is a cop.
Very interesting.
The policy rationale is, in my opinion, unconvincing in the extreme. It is true that the reasons why people may wish to resist unlawful arrest have nothing to do with a fear of the consequences of being brought before the courts, but rather with a fear of the personal consequences to their well-being before they ever get before the courts - and recent events have, I think, amply demonstrated that such fears are hardly “outmoded in our contemporary society”.
In short, whatever the historical reasons why such a common-law right existed in the first place, its contemporary relevance is not a reason to eliminate it.
The more simple calculus, as articulated by the Ontario Court of Appeal, owes nothing to a policy analysis of the historic origins of the right - it is that an unlawful arrest = an assault, and people generally have a right to self-defence against an assault.
But if there was video showing as clear as day what really happened, we wouldn’t have any disputed eyewitness accounts. Objective evidence wins out over liars and exaggerators. People stories’ would more than likely match up with the video, because they wouldn’t have just their memories to go off on.
Which is 1) still disputed and 2) has nothing to do with whether his death was justified.
The more that I think about Brown, the more I see the similarities to Garner. What was Brown accused of stealing? Cigars. What did Garner’s purported offense involve? Cigarettes. Tobacco products, yall! Even if we accept as true that both men had done something unlawful, these crimes do not merit capital punishment and are not synonymous with violent thuggery.
There very well could be evidence…that doesn’t change whether his death was unjustified. Like I said before, thinking otherwise gives cops permission to treat petty criminals and other “undesirables” like wild game. It’s the stuff of dystopias.
Also of note is that the Michigan case cites State v. Valentine, which was confined to resisting arrest where all that was ats take was a loss of freedom:
So, even under this rationale (if not under the statutes of NY), in the instant case - where the “resisting” was done in the course of the cops inflicting injury, the man would have the legal right to resist by force - if the arrest was unlawful.
I doubt he intended to kill Garner. But the whole reason the hold has been banned for use by LE is that people kept dying when it applied on them. And then the departments got the poo sued out of them. LAPD banned their use in 1980. NYPD banned them in 1985, then reaffirmed in 1993.
NY Police Commissioner said this:
Bolding mine.
So a police officer used a technique specifically banned by his department because it’s potentially lethal and unnecessary and the hold resulted in a foreseeable death.
Some was killed as a result of the act. Garner’s dead. Check.
The act was inherently dangerous. Banned by NYPD because it was too dangerous. Check.
**
The defendant knew or should have known… **Officer knows or is supposed to know what techniques are specifically banned and why. Check.
To this layman, it seems pretty cut and dried case of involuntary manslaughter. Garner’s resisting arrest need not even enter the discussion. But if we must, then we add the obvious that he was resisting arrest on a penny ante misdemeanor and that many other less-dangerous techniques were available to the officers.
Neither man was killed because of tobacco. They were killed because they violently resisted arrest. By your logic, if an officer in my state saw a man smoking a cigarette within 25 feet of the entrance to a restaurant, the man responded by yelling “DIE, PIG!” and pulling out a gun, and the officer shot him dead, it would be “capital punishment for a minor offense”.