Posted on 07/08/2010 4:12:35 PM PDT by Ramius
Edited on 07/08/2010 4:18:47 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Oakland (CNN) -- A verdict has been reached in the trial of a former police officer who is white and who is accused of killing an unarmed black man in Oakland, California, according to a superior court spokesman. The verdict will be read at 4 p.m. (7 p.m. ET).
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Let's hope that is but a joke.
If this is similar to the kind of stun gun the policeman had, I can understand the confusion in mistaking his handgun for his taser under the duress of taking down a person resisting arrest. The jury must have taken that into consideration in the involuntary manslaughter ruling.
I tell you what, you shoot someone in the back and see if you get off so light on such superficial circumstances.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZTbJH6BNaU&feature=related
Give it a rest, dude. Accidents happen. Even tragic ones. There isn’t enough jail space for sociopaths who intentionally hurt people, let alone for bad luck situations like this.
One minute, you are a person doing a tough job. The next minute you should be sent away for a long stretch? Sorry. The other poster upthread had it correct about the poor quality of your comment.
I don’t have any heartburn over the verdict. From what I’ve seen I think it accurately reflects what happened. I don’t think the cop intended to execute the guy. I think he intended to taze him. Yes, it was his own dumb self that grabbed the wrong weapon. Along with his negligence under stress, there’s clearly a training issue in the department. I wonder if he carried them both on his right side. Bad idea, that.
When I did boardings, the advice I got (and took) was that the lethal thing (the .45) was on my right hand, and the nonlethal things (curb60 tear gas and the baton) were on my left hand. No way to screw that up, even under pressure.
I’ve seen the video many times. The guy was fighting even with three cops trying to get him cuffed. That’s why they were calling for the tazer.
Even if he were going for his taser, and I don’t know that to be the fact, there was still no excuse to tase the guy. He was on the ground, on his belly, and not resisting.
How any reasonable person can justify this defies logic. Unless of course, they are bootlickin JBTs...
I was a jury member in a murder trial. There needs to be some context for the video. It was an accident. I sympathize with the victim and the officer.
I keep reading comments on many of the forums discussing this case referring to Mesherle as an “officer”, and so many assume he is a policeman, but to my knowledge, he is a BART security guard.
Now, a well trained police officer wouldn’t make the mistake of pulling his gun, thinking it was a taser (according to my son-in-law, who knows these things).
S-I-L said that the training for a security guard is not as extensive, and he nay have been carrying both weapons on the same hip. Police have the taser on one hip, and the gun on the other.
So, I can easily see where an inexperienced and less than perfectly trained security guard could have easily made a tragic mistake, and my heart goes out to him.
I suggest we all pray for him, and his family. Leaping to conclusions is what “a town without pity” does. And we don’t want FreeRepublic to be that unkind, short-sighted, and “quick on the trigger”, do we?
Came across this one. Notice the guy walking in one the left at the beginning. Its looks like he has a gun in his right hand (0:13).
Is this the same guy that later gets shot (3:07 - check the color of the jacket he's wearing)?
BART police are fully sworn police officers, just like any other municipal police officer in the state. They aren’t just “security guards” like you see in the mall. Now... whether their training is satisfactory or not... is another question for another time.
I think it’s a different guy. But yes... it sure looks like a gun in his hand. Doesn’t look like a phone.
BART police officers are fully sworn peace officers that have the same powers of arrest as city police officers and county sheriff's deputies. In addition, BART officers attend the same police academies and receive continuous police training.
Thank you for the information.
Are you of the opinion that the shooting was intentional?
Found this post over on the PajamasMedia thread -
“65. barge captain
A few essential facts for the uninformed:
1. Earlier on New Years Eve, 2009, just a few hours before Oscar Grant was shot, a different group of passengers was bothering riders on the same BART line, and when confronted by officers, one of them pulled out a gun, but fled before firing it, and eventually jumped off the platform at Oakland West while fleeing and was seriously injured. So the BART cops already knew that unruly passengers on BART that night were toting guns, and so were justifiably on edge.
2. The autopsy on Oscar Grant revealed that he was totally hopped up on alcohol, cocaine and FENTANYL, a heroin substitute more powerful than dilaudid. He was totally stoned and probably out of his gourd and irrational.
3. Oscar Grant himself was arrested for brandishing a gun a few years earlier, convicted and spent jail time over it. He was a known thug, despite his canonization in the media.
4. The gang Oscar Grant was with that night was rampaging up and down the BART train terrorizing the passengers and brawling with anybody who would fight. Oscar was in the thick of it.
These mitigating facts seriously cast the incident in a different light. BART cops are not like “mall cops” as some have described them: they are in a highly dangerous situation on a daily basis and have to deal with gangs with guns, terrorism threats, and just plain thugs like Oscar Grant running rampant in the system. No wonder Mehserle was seriously stressed out, because he was acutely aware of the gun incident on the same line a short time earlier.
Before you condemn Mehserle based on emotion, put yourself in his shoes. Stress-induced accident is entirely believable. And not a single witness ever said that Mehserle ever did anything unprofessional aside from this one incident.
July 8, 2010 - 7:09 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
No, I don’t think it was intentional. I think the cop honestly intended to pull his Tazer. I don’t believe he intended to just execute the guy. I think he screwed up badly, and I think involuntary manslaughter is probably the right verdict.
“...gone out of their way in recent years to make the taser look and and fee[l] more like a handgun (specifically a Glock.)”
Good point. It might be that they want the taser to feel like a weapon officers will be familiar with to make it point easier, and look like a firearm so as not to embolden the perp into thinking “it’s only a taser” and try anything stupid.
But that’s just my two cents. I have no idea what psychology goes into designing that stuff.
Probably. But it is far more likely that they are, themselves, cynical because of being treated to these sideshows of rampaging savages so many times before.
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