17 y/o Antwon Rose Was Murdered After Running Away from a Cop
All too often in today’s society, we see stories in the news where a police officer has killed someone’s child and ultimately ends up suffering zero consequences for the murder that they’ve committed.
Sure, after the shooting you’ll learn that the officer is on either a paid or unpaid leave of absence as the matter is being investigated.
However, as history has shown us this is mostly illusory, as the department along with the police unions has traditionally attempted to limit their legal liability at all costs. Meaning, they will settle with the family members of the victim to the tune of millions of dollars.
Normally these types of monetary post-mortem arrangements and exchange of blood money come with a caveat, that being that the civil suits will be dropped with no admission of wrongdoing on the part of the officer.
Now, it’s easy to see why some families will take the money and run. Nothing will give them their child back, nothing in the world. Yet, money, it tends to make life a little bit less of a struggle. So what is the right thing to do?
The odds are generally not in the favor of the victim’s family that a police officer will be held accountable for his or her wrongdoings. That may be another reason why many families choose to accept the money and drop their civil suits.
However, the problem with accepting this blood money is that it doesn’t encourage society to change. I mean, what we are talking about here is serious business. It is the wrongful death of a loved one.
Can we really put a price on the heads of our own family members and if we do what incentive does that give to the police to correct course and adopt a policy that makes sense?
Aside from America's litany of bad laws, the way in which some law enforcement officers operate in this country is many times, truly abhorrent. There are several reasons why this could be the case. E.g., some police departments won’t hire people if their IQ is too high.
It’s little wonder that we find ourselves in the situation that we do, where police will choose violence over logic when dealing with a challenge. Just recently, Antwon Rose, a 17-year-old from Pittsburgh was shot in the back by a cop after attempting to run away.
Fortunately, in his case, the video was clear and the cop was immediately charged with criminal homicide. However, I still have my doubts when Michael Rosfeld attends his trial that he will be convicted as many police officers seem to get off scot-free much to the chagrin of everyone whose following the case.
It seems to me that in this particular case, there is enough evidence for the lawyers of the mother of Antwon to hold the police officer criminally accountable for his actions. They will, therefore, be seeking a criminal conviction. Additionally, after the criminal trial, I can only imagine that there will be a civil trial too.
I think it might be safe to say with this particular incident seeing as how the evidence is so damning, that if there is not a criminal conviction one might forecast the potentiality that there may end up being riots in the streets of Pittsburgh. Hopefully, justice will prevail and things don't end up getting even worse.
After a productive conversation in the comments this article was edited for accuracy.
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The reason there are civil settlements in cases where there are not criminal penalties is because there are very different standards for criminal and civil liability, as there should be. That does not mean anyone is getting away with a crime.
You know, I think that you may be correct. I may be conflating civil and criminal. If we examine just civil for example, it seems like when the family does settle there is usually a clause whereby no admission of wrongdoing occurs prior to money changing hands. This type of clause has to be saving someone's bacon right? I remember being thoroughly confused by the OJ trials how he got off on the murder charge but then later had to pay a bunch of money to the families for the murder of Nicole and Ron. I couldn't reconcile the two, either he commit the murder or he did not, and wasn't trying him twice double jeopardy? I'm still not sure that I entirely comprehend that to this day. So, I'm glad you pointed that out, as parts of this article as it is currently written may be a little bit confused.
The key thing is understanding what "murder" really means, it's only a murder if a court decides that all the criteria for that crime have been met, beyond a reasonable doubt, civil cases don't deal in murder at all, they deal with "wrongful death" and they only need a preponderance of the evidence to show that someone was liable for a wrongful death. They are liable, not guilty. If you kill someone legally, like in self defense, then it is not murder nor wrongful death. If you look through some of the statistics presented we see that most of the time the homicides are justified, they put all the focus on cases where they are not and then act as if they are typical when in fact they are the exception. It's good that we have a high standard for criminal convictions.
I think often police use tricky language to slide out of the murder charge. Like the classic: "I was in fear for my life", whether they actually were or not. Then it shifts to the civil aspect and maybe whether or not it was a wrongful death. That might be the point where if the police can offer enough money on the condition that the plaintiff will drop the suit, that sometimes it will be dropped.
I think this tactic potentially saves them millions either that or it retains the insurance rates at the status quo and means that the officer in question is still fully employable. This is mostly just speculation, I'm sure the benefits to the police when settling are multifaceted for both the officer and the department itself. I definitely have to read up on this topic more in order to get a better or more full comprehension of it.
One thing is for certain the department and the unions are masterful at the art of dodging criminal convictions and getting people to settle without admitting any wrongdoing. I think I understand why some are taking money now, if all of the doors have been closed to a criminal conviction the whole thing becomes about money. Unless, someone accused of a wrongful death in a civil court can be put in jail and I don't think that's the case right?
I can't remember the name of the case right now but there was a supreme court decision that basically a police officer can shoot someone if it looks like they are reaching for a gun. That's when they stopped planting guns on suspects because they no longer needed to. It is important for the officer to say they were in fear for their life but that is not actually the standard. The standard is would a reasonable person in that situation feel they were in fear for their life so they do have to prove that it was reasonable to perceive a threat. In this case where the kid was running away with a magazine in his pocket if he reached into his pocket to perhaps throw it then the cop could interpret that as reaching for a gun (wasn't this like a rookie cop or something?) and then reasonably shoot him. It's not reasonable to require cops to wait until they actually pull out a gun to shoot because by then it is usually too late. People do shoot cops pretty frequently, they have a lot higher chance of people shooting at them than most people and so they have to shoot back more often than regular people and occasionally some fuck up. Sometimes their fuck ups rise to the level of a criminal offense but usually they really are not. It like the guy who died in the back of the police van, those cops didn't conspire to murder him, they just left him unbuckled, that's a good example of a case where there is clearly civil responsibility, they had a hand in causing his death, but they didn't intend or premeditate his death.
The media wants to create racial narratives out of these cases at a drop of a hat whenever they can, that speaks to having a divisive agenda instead of reporting on things objectively or accurately.
That was supposed to be a racist cop murdering a gentle young man but the fact of the matter was he attacked the cop in his car and tried to grab his gun and that several witnesses totally lied. But by the time the facts came out the media had already spread the lies far and wide.
Civil cases and criminal cases are separate you can totally be found both criminally and civilly liable. For example a fellow embezzled a bunch of money from a club I belong to, he is in jail now and we are also suing him to take his house as restitution.
Oh yeah, to be honest I wasn't even viewing this particular incident through a racial lens at all. Whenever I see police brutality or what I perceive to be an unlawful killing perpetrated by a police officer, I will call it how I see it. I'm pretty comfortable calling this one a murder or whatever the proper language is criminal homicide but for all I know that language may be being used because it's easier for a cop to wiggle out of a criminal homicide than it is a murder charge. The whole system is kind of convoluted and very specific when it comes to the world of legalese it's allot of parsing hairs. The illusion of a process can be carried out while an actual injustice is occurring in front of everyone's eyes. As far as the Michael Brown case goes, after the convenience store robbery and without any video evidence it was very hard for me to take sides on that one. So I didn't, if I was a member of the jury it the evidence would have made things easier to determine who was in the wrong.
So you think there was premeditation on the part of the officer to kill this young man? That's what they need for first degree murder, depending on the specifics it would be probably be rightly classified as manslaughter. Just like if you got in a scuffle on the street and one punched someone and they died, that's manslaughter.
You were exactly right to see what the jury has to say, but we have the media making these circuses before the jury says anything, causing riots and shit, and totally painting a false picture just to upset and divide people. White people are shot by cops improperly not infrequently but almost never make the national news because that would ruin their false narrative.
If there was premeditation it would have been in that brief moment that he decided to use deadly force to kill a scared kid who was running away from him. I think meditation can happen on the fly. Our brains are like supercomputers. We make complex calculations very quickly and then act upon them. So the point of premeditation, it might be arguable depending on how you look at it. Maybe that's why they are going with criminal homicide instead?