Posted on 04/03/2018 5:47:43 AM PDT by Kaslin
The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a police officer who shot a woman outside of her home in Tucson, Arizona in May 2010. The officer, Andrew Kisela, shot Amy Hughes after she was seen acting "erratically," hacking at a tree with a knife and arguing with her roommate.
Kisela and another police officer, Alex Garcia, heard about the report on their patrol car radio and responded. A third police officer, Lindsay Kunz, arrived on the scene on her bicycle.
All three officers drew their guns. At least twice they told Hughes to drop the knife. Viewing the record in the light most favorable to Hughes, Chadwick said “take it easy” to both Hughes and the officers. Hughes appeared calm, but she did not acknowledge the officers’ presence or drop the knife. The top bar of the chain-link fence blocked Kisela’s line of fire, so he dropped to the ground and shot Hughes four times through the fence. Then the officers jumped the fence, handcuffed Hughes, and called paramedics, who transported her to a hospital. There she was treated for non-life-threatening injuries. Less than a minute had transpired from the moment the officers saw Chadwick to the moment Kisela fired shots.
Hughes, they later learned, had a history of mental illness. She and Chadwick were roommates and they apparently had a disagreement over $20.
Kisela, Garcia and Kunz defended Kisela's decision to shoot, noting they believed at the time that Hughes was a threat to Chadwick. Still, Hughes sued Kisela, alleging that he had used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
In their ruling Monday, the Supreme Court cited several other court cases as precedent in their acquittal of the police officer. They cited Kisela’s qualified immunity, which protects public officials from damages for civil liability as long as they did not violate an individual's "clearly established" statutory or constitutional rights, Cornell explains.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, offering a different perspective of what transpired, concluding Officer Kisela acted hastily.
"Kisela did not wait for Hughes to register, much less respond to, the officers’ rushed commands," Sotomayor insisted. "Instead, Kisela immediately and unilaterally escalated the situation."
Furthermore, he gave no advance warning that he would shoot, and "attempted no less dangerous methods to deescalate the situation."
She also disagreed with her colleagues in terms of qualified immunity. An officer is not entitled to qualified immunity, she said, if “(1) they violated a federal statutory or constitutional right, and (2) the unlawfulness of their conduct was ‘clearly established at the time.’”
Hughes, Sotomayor noted, had not committed a crime. Furthermore, when the police officers arrived on the scene, reports indicate that Hughes was standing “composed and content” during her encounter with Chadwick. With the above context, the justice came to the following conclusion.
The majority today exacerbates that troubling asymmetry. Its decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished. Because there is nothing right or just under the law about this, I respectfully dissent.
You can read the whole court ruling – and Sotomayor’s dissent – here.
......”she ignored calls from three police officers to drop her weapon, which she held while standing within six feet of her roommate”......
That’s a clear and present danger.....especially since she’ was a loon to begin with.
....” Deadly force should only be used when there is a credible threat to someone’s safety... I’m not seeing that here”...
Six feet away from the other gal waving her knife and continuing making threats....., refusing to disarm after three attempts/refusing to do so. Time for her to go down.
If my kid was in that situation, with a barrier between me and the threat of my child on the other side...I’d dang sure fire...esepcially when she refused to drop the weapon.
Do you know what lethal means?
I would consider getting shot in the ass four times by a cop to be lethal force.
Nothing like a mentally ill female with an edged weapon. She should thank God she is still alive. Glad I’m not a cop.
“Nothing like a mentally ill female with an edged weapon.”
A mentally ill female with a nuclear arsenal would be much worse.
Yet in 2016 our nation almost voted to . . . oh, forget it.
It doesn’t matter what you consider a word to mean. The definition of words are agreed upon by those of us who use the English language, and conveniently organized in alphabetical order in a special book known as a dictionary.
Your opinions are worthless if you invent your own private meanings for the words you use to express them.
“Lethal” means ‘sufficient to cause death’.
I'm sure the small contingent of bootlickers are out upthread to link arms in solidarity in their support of the police state against the citizens. It's as predictable as the rising sun.
Absolutely. The JBT cheerleading contingent on FR don't believe citizens have a right to live if a cop thinks otherwise.
Will you give yourself the freedom to kill another if you fear for your life?
Or simple English; either.
It appears that shelterguy would just let the knifeless woman worry about her own safety.
Really...
I don’t fear for my life when I see the neighbor on the other side of the fence chopping at a tree with a steak knife.
Maybe it scares you, I don’t know.
Good luck finding a 'regular citizen'!
You might want to amend that count. From the first line of the dissent...
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE GINSBURG joins, dissenting.
Both these libtards are normally batshit crazy, but in this case not. The problem is, that the pendulum has swung so far on the side of immunity for police, that the rest of the court didn't even think this case was exceptional. IMO, given the facts of the case as described in the documents, this is a bad thing.
“Lethal” means ‘sufficient to cause death’.
You think a pistol is not a lethal weapon. I hope you can get some help.
You didn’t answer the question.
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