Guilty on all three charges. Good news. Maybe they should have charged him with everything up to murder one, just to see exactly what he could be convicted of. (Not really.)
Mark Slackmeyer face. "Guilty, guilty, guilty!"
I feel . . . relieved.
I'm glad of the verdict, but I'm really glad to not be feeling crushing disappointment right now.
I thought they'd split the baby on a verdict.
7: I put up the image on Twitter and got another response along those lines.
I am really shocked. What kind of sentence is he looking at?
13: NYT headline says "may face 40 years"
Pretty relieved, especially after getting half a dozen texts and emails from work at 2:45 pm, Saying "get out of downtown within the next 15 minutes." (Most of us are still working from home, but many of my colleagues live downtown.)
Anyhow, everyone on FB is girding for the next fight and the Wright murder of course.
And standing there, as big as life, smiling with his eyes
Said George: "What they could never kill went on to organize"
It's amazing that even with that utterly horrific video and a prosecutor actually making an effort at obtaining a conviction (unlike, say, Tim McGinty in the Tamir Rice case) and a Minneapolis PD that had clearly (and rightly!) decided to throw Chauvin under the bus, I thought there was a real chance that he would walk.
Relieved. I was so worried the verdict would light a match to a powder keg. Still outraged and saddened over the whole situation, though.
I predicted a hung jury and still predict shenanigans on appeal but I am glad to discover that my grounds for assuming the absolute worst of the American public at every turn was demonstrably wrong here.
Cannot believe the sheer tone deafness of Pelosi just now though.
19: one of the neighborhoods near me and George Floyd Square is called 'Powderhorn Park', but local wags have dubbed it 'Powderkeg Park.'
Bail revoked: Chauvin taken into custody. Good (I was worried they would let him return home while awaiting sentencing).
Maybe it was wish fulfillment, but I thought those eyes twitching faster and faster into rabbity fear was some good schadenfreude.
Nancy Pelosi not enhancing the mental with-it-ness of geriatric CA lawmakers:
"Thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for justice," while speaking at a CBC presser. "Because of you and because of thousands, millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous for justice."
23: "those eyes twitching faster and faster into rabbity fear" is very apt.
Here's what I'm curious about: the two lead prosecutors, Blackwell and Schleicher, are both in private practice and working for the state on this case pro bono. Schleicher has experience as a prosecutor, and Blackwell's background is corporate defense. Granted, there were also a number of AAGs working for the prosecution, but is it notable at all that Ellison went to outside attorneys here?
23: I am glad it resonated with someone else. I don't go in for schadenfreude very often, but when I do, I like to have people to share it with.
26: I have often wondered if we could have a national strike force of former prosecutors now in private practice and/or on faculty who agree to be on tap to go after police/FBI charged so that the whole conflict of interest thing is lessened.
24 is really something else. Every little boy dreams of growing up, getting killed, sparking mass protests, and having the bare minimum of justice held to widespread surprise.
26: Given Ellison's background (as a notable movement lawyer, for y'all who didn't know), I feel it is a virtual certainty that he didn't trust the usual clowns to take care of it. Especially after nonsense like their ridiculous prosecution of anarchist lawyer J0rd@n Kushn3r a couple of years ago. I believe he and Ellison have both made ADAs cry in court.
Re: 24 (and 28):
https://twitter.com/HalfOnionInABag/status/1384642737459195907
As I said elsewhere, Blackwell is a family friend, so I followed his participation closely. I think he did a great job. I don't love that the state emphasized the "one bad apple" aspect so heavily, but it was probably necessary to get a conviction.
Putting the system on trial was basically what the defense wanted.
Biden's remarks were pretty well done. They called out the very specific circumstances that led to this verdict, including a call-out to how often police just close ranks rather than testify against their own.
This line from the StarTribune pretty much sums up how far we have to go:
Mothers brought their young children out to witness the celebration of a historic conviction of a white man who killed an unarmed Black man while on duty.
No fucking words:
https://twitter.com/LaceyCrisp/status/1384665355046592519
Paula Bryant tells me her 16 year-old daughter Ma'Khia Bryant was an honor roll student and a sweet child. Ma'Khia was shot and killed by a [@ColumbusPolice] on Legion Lane at 4:30p today.
I've actually only been following the case lightly, and while I'm not shocked by the verdict, given the situation, I'd say I was pleasantly surprised. So, perhaps someone else here might know if there are any good, in-depth pieces about the intersection of Chicago and 38th where George Floyd was murdered. It's been a site of conflict for a long, long time. And, for some people, a place for hopeful beginnings. In a time when a lot of non-profits have been folding, the Fire Arts Center already had several years under its belt, pre-pan. CUP Foods, while still problematic in its relationship with the neighborhood, the police, and a lot of potential grant money floating around. And then there's the Speedway, (AKA StupidAmerica), in some ways a moderating influence, but also its own source of problems. Big, old church and big, deep park round out the intersection. There's a small/medium hospice (I think originally for HIV/AIDS patients?) and a Bahai house of worship and a big, rather down-at-the-heels daycare center as near neighbors. About 3/4 of a mile down 38th is Sabathani Community Center, a cavernous former high school, shuttered in the Big Shuffle that MPS did in '82, and since then probably the most radical, and certainly one of the largest community centers in the city. Some people you know might even have chosen it as the venue for an anarchist conference many long years ago. (Only slightly interrupted by the initiation exercises of a bunch of jovial, young Prince Hall Masons.) I volunteered there doing childcare on behalf of an anarchist childcare collective, for kids whose mothers were taking a Spanish-language Zumba class.
Informally, but it's one of those things everybody knows but will rarely say, it's kind of the border between Black and white areas in central South Minneapolis. When I've walked up Chicago towards Lake St., towards Lake St, there's a sense you get of declining prospects the further north you go.
So in a lot of ways, CUP Foods is EXACTLY the place you would expect something like this to happen. Further north, the cops might have been called, and maybe there'd be some brutality, but a lot of these killings seem to cluster in areas that mark the boundaries between BIPOC and white neighborhoods, not so much in their centers. Cf. Daunte Wright and Kobe Heisler in Brooklyn Center, a border suburb between Black North Minneapolis and the white suburbs to the north. That's how they enforce the color line, at the edges.
I've hoped for some kind of reckoning since Tycel Nelson was shot. We're not there yet, but it certainly seems more likely now than it did in the past.
a lot of these killings seem to cluster in areas that mark the boundaries between BIPOC and white neighborhoods, not so much in their centers
That's interesting, and makes a lot of sense.
A white friend of mine, a much, much more righteous and creative person than me, taught in North Minneapolis public schools for a decade or so. He's a great guy, real To Sir, With Love type -- really rooting for every one of his students. A really decent human being, with a bit of the Imp of the Perverse too, but in a nice way. Anyway, he's had like half a dozen of his former students dead from gunshots starting when he was still teaching. I can't even imagine what that feels like, to say nothing of my colleague at the old firm, a very nice, atheistic young Black woman, who told me once that a full dozen people she knew in her extended social circle had been murdered in some way by the time she was 18. What the fuck? Is this not crazy? This country just gets more and more psychotic the longer it goes on. And I'm the nutjob because I think the police are a big part of the problem? Everyone knows that most police departments harbor avowed, sadistic racists, who not only have no problem enforcing the color line at the point of an AR-15, but very likely enjoy it too. But if you say that in public, you're a kook. I dunno. Either I'm completely crazy or the world is, it probably comes out about the same in the end.
The security forces are harboring thousands of violent, proud racists, and thousands more who don't care much either way, but won't oppose the racists, except in the most extreme circumstances.
My brother and sister-in-law lived at 38th and Elliott for 15 years at least. They're a few miles away now, I think.
Who thinks you're the nutjob? The police have been getting increasingly brazen, at an increasing rate, for years and years. As local writer Chris La Tray puts it -- and Natilo, you might want check out his substack -- that blue line flag has mostly replaced the Confederate flag as a fascist tribal identifier.
The question is what can be done about it. Fire a shit ton of officers, certainly. Change the model and the culture for those that remain.
The police have been getting increasingly brazen, at an increasing rate, for years and years.
I often wonder to what extent this is true. Chauvin would never have been arrested without video. (But yeah, it really says something about the police that they are willing to act the way they do knowing they are being filmed.)
41.2: Yes, hard to know. One of the things that never gets enough media attention is that we simply do not collect data on police killings of non-police, at least not in any rigorous or defensible public-agency way. (The FBI collects data but there are a ton of gaps.)
The best data we have is either compiled by the media (Guardian and Wash Post have both done projects) or nonprofit volunteer sites like Fatal Encounters.
And it was only after Mike Brown's murder, and after police killings data started getting compiled by advocates, that we got two of the most stunning statistics:
In the US, if you are murdered by a stranger, there is a 1 in 3 chance that stranger will be a police officer. ONE IN THREE.
And: If you are a Black man, your lifetime risk of being killed by a police officer is 1 in 1,000.
40-ish: It's about the time for me to note that the Republic of Georgia fired its entire highway police force because of corruption and a culture of impunity. The re-constituted force was about 1/4 the size of the previous one, and was far more effective. (At least in the first decade or so; it may have slipped back some in the interim. Keeping corruption at bay is a hard task, especially in the Caucasus.)
Also, one thing I learned around the time of Ferguson is that a lot of little jurisdictions are essentially tax farms with the police forces as the farmers. Many of them were created to serve white supremacy. Hennepin County, for example, has 44 cities within its borders. Most of them probably just need to be abolished in toto. Nobody who wasn't sucking on the teat for a city job will probably even notice, and a lot of things are likely to get better if run by a larger entity.
43.last: May I introduce you to the RCMP who prove a larger force doesn't always solve the problem. For those interested, the Canadaland podcast had a great series on policing in Canada including several episodes on the RCMP
Glad about the verdict, less glad that it was ever in doubt. Also less glad that the MPD hasn't been shut down pending reorganisation. Whoever overlooked Chauvin's history of domestic violence and hired him presumably still has a job.
Also, what are murder 1, 2 and 3? Manslaughter I understand. But do you have a league table for various types of murder?
44: Point taken. Brooklyn Center, another Twin Cities jurisdiction with a recent police shooting, looks like a classic example to me. Set up in the 1910s to avoid annexation of the area by the city, no geographic reason for it to exist separately.
Explanation of the charges here. Turns out Minnesota is one of only a few states that has a third degree murder category. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/04/19/derek-chauvin-murder-manslaughter-charges-sentencing-breakdown/7286597002/
What a huge relief. When are the other cops going on trial?
The Columbus situation -- the 16-year-old girl who got shot -- is a strong argument for body cams. The shooting victim was unambiguously lunging with (something that certainly looks like) a knife at someone who wasn't fighting back.
Even given the footage, shooting immediately did not look to me like the decision that was most likely to maximize the number of survivors.
If the police cannot break up a fight between teenaged girls, even if one is armed with a paring knife, without resorting to lethal violence, they are functionally inept.
Body cams are absolutely, definitively not the solution. We have run the experiment, collected the data.
Abolish the police.
51: That's interesting. I don't see the cop's role in that situation as maximizing the number of survivors. It seems to me that the proper choice is to stop a potentially deadly attack.
I think my description is fair -- I used the word "lunge" advisedly, and her arm was cocked back in a way that strongly suggested an intent to stab. But she had previously attacked another person who was backing off, and I think she had the knife in her hand when she did that. Maybe she only intended to threaten with the knife, and wouldn't have stabbed at all. But that's not what it looked like to me.
So what's the guidance here with a knife-wielding assailant? Don't shoot until the knife goes in? Or, if we're maximizing survivors, is it okay to shoot even then?
I don't see the cop's role in that situation as maximizing the number of survivors.
I think the cop didn't either, and I think that is a terrible approach to policing. You don't know the rights or wrongs of what was going on beyond the seconds of the video, and the cop who just pulled up didn't either -- the fact that the girl who the cop killed was the one who called the police suggests that she was not the only source of physical danger in the encounter.
The police philosophy in a lot of these incidents, and your comment suggests that you share it, seems to be that the value of the life or safety of someone who in the moment looks as if they are (and may in fact be) a danger to others should be valued at zero, and that seems very wrong to me.
Another way to think about it is that stabbing someone is a very serious crime, even if the victim is not seriously injured. But it doesn't, and shouldn't, carry the death penalty. Killing someone to prevent them from injuring another person is not an easy call where the cop can be sure that killing is always the right answer -- it should, in my view, depend on an assessment of the plausible severity of the injury prevented. Just because the girl was making aggressive motions with a knife didn't mean someone was going to die right then if the cop didn't kill her.
The police philosophy in a lot of these incidents, and your comment suggests that you share it, seems to be that the value of the life or safety of someone who in the moment looks as if they are (and may in fact be) a danger to others should be valued at zero, and that seems very wrong to me.
It's not clear to me what you mean by "a lot of these incidents." If you mean incidents where someone appears to be lunging at an unarmed person with a deadly weapon, or incidents where body cams are used, then yeah, I guess I'm making a point about "a lot of these incidents."
I certainly don't think that the assailant's life should be valued at zero, and the evidence I've seen so far in this particular instance is that the police didn't think so, either. From the early evidence, the police seem to have acted promptly to get the victim medical attention, and the cop seems to have held back even during the knife-wielding assailant's prior attack on a person in front of him.
So we're back to my question: What should the officer have done here?
I may not have seen all the video you saw? What I saw looked as if the cop got out of the car and shot within a few seconds -- what holding back are you talking about?
he's had like half a dozen of his former students dead from gunshots
My childhood best friend is a special ed teacher in Minneapolis now and he has a similar story. I think it was three this year.
The other immediate case I was thinking of was the Chicago kid who was killed with his hands up after throwing away the gun he had been holding. I can see it as plausible that the cop who killed him didn't realize he'd dropped the gun. But even if the cop thought he was still holding a gun, there was nothing in the video I saw that looked as if the kid was about to shoot anyone. That shooting also looked to me like the cop deciding that having fled from a police officer while holding a gun made the kid dangerous enough that it was fine to kill him regardless of whether it was necessary to preserve anyone's life.
Cops have a shoot to kill doctrine, which seems dumb to me. They are trained that every shot should be a kill shot but what if they weren't? Shooting someone in the legs is a pretty brutal thing to do but its better than killing somebody who doesn't have to die.
I don't know shit about guns, but I have read consistently that shooting to wound really doesn't work -- that if you want to stop someone from doing something without killing them, a gun is not a useful tool for achieving that goal. But someone who was a more knowledgeable gun person than I am (and you easily might be) could contradict me on that.
57: It moves fast! I am generally leery of justifying police actions because of their need to make split-second evaluations, but I can understand if you didn't see everything the first time you looked. I had to look at it in slow-motion a couple of times to make any sense out of it, and I'm still open to the idea that I missed something important.
Here's how I understood the video: The cop got out of his car and watched the knife-wielding girl attack another girl first -- that girl, who wasn't fighting back, fell to the ground in front of the cop. Then the 16-year-old went for the girl in the pink sweatsuit, who was backed up against a car and also not fighting back. The 16-year-old cocked her knife-arm back. That's when she got shot.
From when the cop got out of the car to the firing of the first shot, it was less than 15 seconds.
Here's some video from the press conference. They played it in real-time first, starting at 6:40 in that recording. I found it impossible in real-time to understand what was happening.
Then at 8:47, they play it again, this time in slow motion. You first see the 16-year-old attacking a girl who is backing off and who falls to the ground (where she is kicked by another assailant). Then came the confrontation with pink-sweatsuit girl. I couldn't see the knife in real-time, but it was apparent in slo-mo.
Even looking at it frame-by-frame, I don't have any guidance for that cop that would lead him to do anything other than what he did. I can't work out how he had any other options.
I don't know shit about guns, but I have read consistently that shooting to wound really doesn't work -- that if you want to stop someone from doing something without killing them, a gun is not a useful tool for achieving that goal.
I've heard that too, but I think I don't buy it. I think its an argument that was created to make shooting to kill more justified.
Or rather, its a big leap from "a gun is not a useful tool for achieving that goal" to "your best option is to shoot to kill."
Are you convinced he saved the pink sweatshirt girl from death or serious injury? If I was, I'd agree with you, but I'm not. The altercation had been going on for long enough that someone had called the cops and they'd had time to get there, and no one was seriously hurt yet.
Other things he could have done -- the obvious one is to have run up and grabbed the girl with the knife from behind.
This is a tougher case than most (and that is a sad sentence to type because in a sane world we wouldn't have a comparison class), because the girl is actually attempting to stab someone (not, e.g., just waving a knife around.) But the standard you're proposing, LB, doesn't hold up, I think -- some knife wounds aren't serious, but plenty of gunshots are survivable too -- that's not a calculation we can expect anyone to make with any precision. I'm pretty sure the proverbial 'good guy with a gun' would have been in the clear here, too. The cases where someone is waving around a knife and gets shot are wrong because there isn't a risk of harm given that knives aren't terribly dangerous distance weapons.
This case is still tragic, and I don't know why a taser wasn't used (or a big stick), but I don't think 'maximize the number of survivors' is the right metric here.
61: My recollection of long-ago conversations with cops about this is that it's not so much that you're shooting to kill; you're shooting to stop someone, and applying a bullet to someone's leg requires a level of precision that isn't available with a handgun. I defer, however, to anyone who actually knows something about this stuff.
Come to think, I would love to see some analysis of this video from a UK cop -- someone from a police force tasked with keeping the peace that doesn't invariably carry guns. Saying that the cop in this situation had no choice but to kill seems to me to ignore the fact that there are now and have historically been cops tasked with intervening in violent situations without the capacity to easily kill.
Cops (and most everyone) can't aim well enough to hit a leg. Anyone trained enough to do so is probably going to have to be a specialized hitter, but a beat cop.
60: The leg has the femoral artery. It's not the less dangerous option, just the one where you're more likely to miss. They're taught 'shoot the torso' because that's how you hit someone.
Back when I knew something about guns, the idea was that you don't draw or fire a gun unless the situation is serious enough to warrant killing someone, because guns are lethal weapons, and they suck as tools for posturing or scaring someone off. If it's not warranted, then the answer isn't 'just shoot them in the leg' but 'don't use the gun at all.'
Handguns aren't terribly accurate, especially under stressful situations. Aiming at the center of mass is the bet to insure you actually hit your target.
65.last Personally I'm a big fan of the big stick or those hoops on poles that Chinese police use.
Other things he could have done -- the obvious one is to have run up and grabbed the girl with the knife from behind.
Okay. He wasn't going to get there before she did whatever she was going to do with the knife -- and when he got there, she was still going to be a violent person with a knife. But you have responded to my question.
And yeah, even with her arm cocked back with the knife, poised to stab, you can't know what was going to happen. I don't think we can even assume she was actually going to stab, and if she did, I agree that the risk to her victim was less than the risk to her from being shot.
So I think we are fairly close in our interpretations of the facts of the situation, and have reached the agree-to-disagree point on the officer's judgment. I think the cop was out of options.
And to be clear about what I'm saying, I wouldn't put this cop in jail -- this doesn't look like murder to me, it looks like an unnecessary death because the cop made a bad decision, but not I think a criminal one.
I think the cop was out of options.
What do you think about the UK cop issue? Do you think a police officer without the option of using a gun would have considered themselves helpless in this situation? My impression is that they do intervene in violent situations, and it's not unworkable.
Here you go LB. Though in Columbus the cop was alone. https://youtu.be/J9TFvh6Xps4
76: Seems like your hypothetical UK cop is obliged to watch the attacks play out, and to risk getting stabbed himself. But like you, I'm interested in hearing the UK cop view.
It's mostly rich people killing each other over adultery and inheritance, if the TV is accurate.
I wish we had a tradition of Peelian policing in the US.
And the militarization of US police is baked right in. Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain instead of Constable, Superintendent, Inspector.
Her great great great grandfather, Sir Robert Peel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
I only know it from Terry Pratchett, but it seems like we should give it a try.
There's at least some lip service to Peelian policing in some US jurisdictions, but there should be more.
I don't think that more lip service will help anyone.
It's a long time since I hung around the police here, and society was much less violent and especially less well armed then. But I don't think the linked video is any help at all: that shows a man waving a knife at three cops who have plenty of time to think, and are not trying to save any innocent third party.
I haven't seen the bodycam video that LB and politicalfootball are arguing about but surely range is relevant here. Could the cop have reached the girl with the knife before she used it on a third party?
85. Dame Diana, she dead. One way of abolishing the police, I suppose.
85. Dame Diana, she dead. One way of abolishing the police, I suppose.
Another thought on whether the Cleveland shooting was good policing -- as it happened, the cop actually hit the girl who was holding the knife. But from the angle he was shooting at, he was very close to aiming at the girl in pink as well. Even if we're presuming that killing the girl with the knife is entirely justified, how much risk of getting shot does it make sense to impose on the girl in pink in order to protect her from being stabbed?
91.last: At the moment the cop shot her, she was too far away for any other intervention.
Columbus, not Cleveland. Just because all of Ohio is indistinguishable to outsiders doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Also, on this count, Columbus isn't as bad as Cleveland.
Whoops. But my point about preserving the safety of the girl in pink by shooting at her stands.
I think I'd like to see an explicitly higher standard of care for LEOs. They're supposed to be trained to deal with situations where a layperson might know what to do, which choice to make. And we don't have to know, and are expected to be able to suss out, on our own, what the right standard should be. In a trial, you'd have competing experts arguing about whether the standard was breached in a particular case. (In this, the analogy to legal negligence is apt. For some cases, like missing a limitations period, you don't need an expert. For others -- maybe failing to move to dismiss on venue grounds, or failing to remove to federal court -- you're definitely going to need experts.)
I don't know enough about this Ohio one to say whether the guy should have exercised different options, but, going back to the Rice shooting, they may have been saying that the officer didn't have very good options considering how close the car pulled up (or something like that) and I'm just not convinced that when we have a crime like negligent homicide on the books -- which is, here, negligently causing a death -- we're stuck with analyzing only the 15 or 30 seconds before the shot is fired.
Like I said to my FB peeps:
I'm simultaneously glad that Derek Chauvin got what should obviously have been coming to him, angry at how rarely that happens, sickened by the number of people who think that shouldn't have happened, overwhelmed by the number of other sick and vicious racist murderers just like him are out there in just the past month, disgusted at the remote likelihood of most of them facing justice, thankful that at least it's not that repulsive pig-creature Trump presiding over the circus now... like, FUCK. I just. I don't know how to FEEL anymore.
I will note for those of us academically discussing whether it was according-to-Hoyle murder to fatally shoot Ma'Khia Bryant: American cops routinely take violent mass murderers and neo-Nazis in the midst of committing violence into custody, alive, without incident. When they're White. Don't kid yourselves.
FWIW, UK cops disarm or disable people with knives all the effing time, without shooting them. That doesn't usually involve them just standing about while the knife-wielder does whatever they like. That's what body armour, batons, tasers and training are for.
That's not to say that they never shoot people in those circumstances. There's been a few knife-wielding terror attacks in the past few years. They've mostly just shot those people. But, generally speaking, shootings by police here are vanishingly rare, and knives and knife usage ... is not.
Hope I didn't say anything that sounds contradictory to 101.3. I do acknowledge that "academic" is a fair description of my approach to the conversation.
Saw Keith Ellison on the news this morning, and while he didn't say it straight out, he came very close to making an obviously correct point that had never occurred to me: Part of what was going on with Chauvin was an exercise of authority not merely over Floyd, but also over the crowd urging him not to kill Floyd.
102: The fact that there exists another flawed, white-majority, in many ways quite racist society whose police forces very rarely kill black people or other people of color really shows how deeply we've fucked things up in America. (And not to say that the British police don't screw up massively, e.g. the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, but it's comparatively rare.)
As an aside, it still shocks me that the knife murder rate is higher in the US than the UK.
102: and in most of the cases where terrorists have been shot, it's been because they are wearing bomb vests, rather than because of the knives. See the 2019 London Bridge case (the narwhal tusk thing, you may recall).
|| We shouldn't be trying to expand the US Supreme Court. We should be trying to shrink it down to one, provided that one is Justice Sotomayor. Here's the last section of her dissent today from the decision allowing life without parole for juveniles.
It is important not to lose sight of what is at stake in this case. "The Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment guarantees individuals the right not to be subjected to excessive sanctions." Miller, 567 U. S., at 469 (internal quotation marks omitted). In Roper, Graham, Miller, and Montgomery, the Court recognized that this guarantee has special significance for children. The Eighth Amendment does not excuse children's crimes, nor does it shield them from all punishment. It does, however, demand that most children be spared from punishments that "giv[e] no chance for fulfillment outside prison walls, no chance for reconciliation with society, no hope." Graham, 560 U. S., at 79.
Jones and other juvenile offenders like him seek only the possibility of parole. Not the certainty of release, but the opportunity, at some point in their lives, to show a parole board all they have done to rehabilitate themselves and to ask for a second chance. Jones recognizes that the parole board may ultimately decide he must spend his entire life behind bars. He simply requests that the State not "mak[e] the judgment at the outset that [he] never will be fit to reenter society." Id., at 75. The Eighth Amendment requires that most juvenile offenders be given this small "hope for some years of life outside prison walls." Montgomery, 577 U. S., at 213.
At his resentencing hearing, Jones told the court, "I'm not the same person I was when I was 15. . . . I've become a pretty decent person in life. And I've pretty much taken every avenue that I could possibly take in prison to rehabilitate myself." App. 152. "Minors do have the ability to change," he reflected. Ibid. He noted in closing, "If you decide to send me back without the possibility of parole, I will still do exactly what I've been doing for ten years. But all I can do is ask you . . . please give me just one chance to show the world, man, like, I can be somebody. I've done everything I could over the past ten years to be somebody. . . . I can't change what was already done. I can just try to show . . . I've become a grown man." Id., at 153. Today, Jones is 31. His time spent in prison has now eclipsed the childhood he had outside of it.
Jones should know that, despite the Court's decision today, what he does in life matters. So, too, do the efforts of the almost 1,500 other juvenile offenders like Jones who are serving LWOP sentences. Of course, nothing can repair the damage their crimes caused. But that is not the question. The question is whether the State, at some point, must consider whether a juvenile offender has demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation sufficient to merit a chance at life beyond the prison in which he has grown up. See Graham, 560 U. S., at 79. For most, the answer is yes.
I've said this before, haven't I.
|>
104: Our police-killing-white-people rate is also very bad. It gets overlooked because our police-killing-people-of-color rate is so much worse, but our baseline level of police shootings (and gun violence, and the two are probably correlated) is higher than the UK.
|| And what else did the Court do today? A couple of cases of interest to admin law nerds. In one, they decided that SS disability litigants don't have to exhaust their constitutional arguments about the appointments of their ALJ before the ALJ. In the other, they decided that the FTC can't get restitution from courts but has to seek it first in an administrative process. This is a real change in how the FTC does business, and will shrink court suits and expand admin litigation. It's not clear to me whether the payday lender in this case is going to get to keep his ill-gotten 1.27 billion dollars. |>
103.last: It's "Your not the boos of me!" all the way down.
It strikes me all the time that US police kill people all the time in circumstances that would be part of routine police work in the UK and justify it because they fear for their life . There's something deeply wrong with training, and attitudes.* I've said before that I'm surprised that "I'm a massive coward who responds with homicidal violence to anything other than immediate subservience" is seen as exculpatory by people defending police homicide, when "I'm a massive coward" should basically be a hard bar to ever being a police officer in the first place.
* alongside the massive racism, of course, but I don't think that's the only thing happening here. British police can also be fairly accused of being racist. Black men are much more likely to be stopped and searched, for example. Police still don't routinely kill people. It's about 3 a year, in a country of 66 million people, and most of the recent ones have been terrorists literally running amok with knives while wearing bomb vests, or driving cars into groups of pedestrians.**
** that's not to say that there aren't some obvious mistakes, and some that are pretty definitely dodgy (mysterious asphyxiation in custody, people shot where the gun they were supposedly wielding has never been found, etc).
It strikes me all the time that US police kill people all the time in circumstances that would be part of routine police work in the UK and justify it because they fear for their life . There's something deeply wrong with training, and attitudes.* I've said before that I'm surprised that "I'm a massive coward who responds with homicidal violence to anything other than immediate subservience" is seen as exculpatory by people defending police homicide, when "I'm a massive coward" should basically be a hard bar to ever being a police officer in the first place.
* alongside the massive racism, of course, but I don't think that's the only thing happening here. British police can also be fairly accused of being racist. Black men are much more likely to be stopped and searched, for example. Police still don't routinely kill people. It's about 3 a year, in a country of 66 million people, and most of the recent ones have been terrorists literally running amok with knives while wearing bomb vests, or driving cars into groups of pedestrians.**
** that's not to say that there aren't some obvious mistakes, and some that are pretty definitely dodgy (mysterious asphyxiation in custody, people shot where the gun they were supposedly wielding has never been found, etc).
It really is remarkable how much grievance, constant complaining, and public expressions of fearfulness have become cornerstones of the conservative movement.
106: Kavanaugh is at least consistent on his view that the sins of your youth should follow you forever...
Imagine Rapey McRapeface interpreting your country's laws for the rest of your life.
I don't think we talked about it when the video was released (apologies if I missed it), but the Windsor, Virginia traffic stop of a black Army officer was pretty bad on the massive-coward-who-expects-immediate-subservience scale. (The cops pepper spray and forcefully arrest the victim.) Constant escalation, giving contradictory commands, making clear that subservience is part of the point. The uniform didn't save him, nor when it was immediately clear that the reason for the traffic stop (no plates) wasn't warranted (he had a temporary paper plate that could've been more visible). It's horrifying.
112: Yep, and people like Trump and Kavanaugh are the perfect standard-bearers.
I've said before that I'm surprised that "I'm a massive coward who responds with homicidal violence to anything other than immediate subservience" is seen as exculpatory by people defending police homicide, when "I'm a massive coward" should basically be a hard bar to ever being a police officer in the first place.
I agree with you in general, but it's a hard argument for someone (like me) to make who isn't claiming not to be a physical coward themselves. In the video I was talking about, I think the cop should have rushed the girl with the knife. That would have been riskier for him than shooting her from a distance, and I would not, myself, want a job where I was required to assume that degree of risk, so I'm a little squeamish about calling him a massive coward. Not temperamentally well suited to serving as a police officer, maybe.
I don't think the recent Columbus case is necessarily an example of cowardice. But in general when somebody goes on and on about being on thin blue line that is society's protection against violent predators, and the 'predator' in question is unarmed and a teenager, you do wonder.
110: In support of your argument, I've noticed that in general the defense of/by the police has gone from 'protecting the community/others' to 'I felt personally scared'. The police aren't even justifying themselves by saying we're all safer any more.
This recent case is perhaps one exception in that they are saying they were saving one girl from another. Although see the above point that the other girl was almost in the line of fire.
116 To fly straight into the face of The Ban, let me just say that I'd be a terrible brain surgeon, and would probably most definitely screw up more surgeries than I'd get right. And we should definitely not hold actual brain surgeons to a standard of care higher than I would want to be held to, if I just started doing brain surgery.
And the problem isn't just individual risk tolerance -- I don't know anything about the bravery of that individual cop -- it's about training that presumes that shooting is the right answer in a situation like this.
I think the problem is that if you enjoy seeking physical dominance over weaker people, being a cop is likely to be a fulfilling position. The behavior of the police during the protests this summer was alarming.
111: It's not so much that they think they're massive cowards, but that the phrase 'I was in fear for my life' trips the qualified immunity circuit, which means they won't be prosecuted/convicted. And of course the line is that it's a *reasonable* fear -- so they're not cowards.
My college has a criminal justice department and enrollments are down a lot in the past few years, and the theory is that the youth who might have wanted to be cops are disgusted by the profession (good for them, but great if the good kids are self-selecting out.)
The alternate theory is that the CSI bump has ended.
This list of people killed by police by country is super interesting. What it looks like to me is active war zones, countries with a history of slavery, and repressive regimes, and then a significant drop off. And even within the US, I think, but would have to look up, that there's a pretty big difference between the rates in slave states and free states.
I can't remember which side Ohio was on.
123: Yeah, the international comparison suggests that something is very wrong in the US (and, sadly, I think there's a strong path dependence element which means it isn't possible to just switch to French levels of police violence, for example).
Here's a list by state: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-killed-police-us-state-population/
It looks like rural states are at the top of the list.
I think easy access to American guns is a big factor. The guns-for-drugs trade in the Americas is just such a huge disastrous nightmare for the western hemisphere.
Lots of people have raised the issue of the notorious inaccuracy of handguns. So why are they issued, when by the time the cop is close enough to be reasonably confident of hitting the target, especially in a crowded situation, they could use a taser anyway. It only makes sense if people higher up the command chain prefer their suspects dead.
The effective range of a taser is smaller still.
It only makes sense if people higher up the command chain prefer their suspects dead.
The higher ups perceive any deviation through a lens of "does this consolidate my power or weaken my power?" Any change that seems to favor civilians must therefore come at their expense. (And they're indifferent to the deaths that happen as collateral damage.)
Aren't lots of people afraid of pushing the use of tasers out of a not-unfounded fear that they will be used not as a replacement for guns but as a general purpose response to any minor inconvenience?
Speaking of the whole enshrined "white people living in fear above", the new laws and proposed laws providing immunity for that who drive into a pedestrian while "fleeing a riot" are a good example of the phenomenon.