RE: 17 y/o Antwon Rose Was Murdered After Running Away from a Cop
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?
probably. To prove premeditation they would need some evidence or malice aforethought, like if he said he wanted to kill some black kid that night.