Posted on 12/08/2014 10:33:48 AM PST by ConservingFreedom
The family of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old shot and killed by Cleveland police last month, said at an emotional press conference Monday that prosecutors should indict the responsible officer without consulting a grand jury. They were joined by attorney Benjamin Crump, who represented the families of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and now represents the Rice family. [...]
The shooting of Tamir Rice, who was playing with a toy gun at park nearby his house, was captured on video, and shows the officers opening fire on the child within seconds of arriving on the scene.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
why did their child have an indistinguishable replica of a real gun? why did the parents think it was smart?
Benjamin Crump is building up those frequent flyer miles going from one racial “incident” to the next.
Crump’s batting average is .000; but we will see about this incident in Cleveland.
Al Jazeera, they report on this case in Louisiana if people haven’t heard about this one.
Just saw the Mom on FNC! Looked like she was given every weave stolen in the ferguson riots.
Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a shame those parents raised a thug kid who liked intimidating others. As for the police, it’s a shame they have to live with the knowledge that they killed a thug kid who wasn’t actually an immediate danger. They had no way of knowing the kid wasn’t a threat until after the fact though. I own a 1911 .45 ACP that is almost identical in appearance to the “toy” the kid was waving around, and I would not have noticed the extremely subtle differences.
It’s a shame the kid hid the toy as the police drove up, and even worse that he behaved stupidly when confronted. It’s a shame the kid when told to “freeze” instead pulled the toy from his waistband. It’s a shame that a .45 ACP responds at 900 fps, which didn’t give the police a sense that they could evaluate the situation at their leisure.
All these things are unfortunate, but they do not in any way justify prosecuting the police for making a completely reasonable decision in a situation in which a reasonable person would have believed that innocent lives were in danger.
Vocational training?
Sharpton on speed dial...
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/24/142983/martin-familys-lawyers-no-strangers.html
Posted on Saturday, March 24, 2012
EXCERPTS
In Trayvon’s case, (Parks & Crump) alerted the news media more quickly. They phoned the Rev. Al Sharpton almost instantly, and organized marches with local civil rights activists. They also started pressing for federal involvement and alleging a cover-up from the get-go.
(snip)
“In court, you have the jury,” Crump says. “Our job is to get the case to a jury. We need to fight first in the court of public opinion. The jury is the American people.”
//
Someone Must Be Punished for Killing Trayvon Martin, Says Mom Sybrina Fulton
by Allison Samuels Mar 22, 2012 2:04 AM EDT
EXCERPT
The now controversial killing of Trayvon garnered virtually no mainstream media attention in the days immediately after he was fatally shot, but that all changed when the teenager’s parents decided to hire civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump and his law firm to get more answers on exactly how and why their son died.
“They called me the same day they were notified that their son was dead,’’ Crump told The Daily Beast. “When I heard their unarmed teenage son was shot to death, I just knew there’d be an arrest shortly. There wasn’t an arrest 48 hours later, and then I knew we’d have to take this outside of Sanford if we wanted justice.’’
Trayvon’s parents were told by the Sanford police that Zimmerman wasn’t arrested in their son’s death because the facts of the case did not dispute his claim of self-defense.
For Crump, taking the Trayvon Martin story outside of Sanford simply entailed dialing up a few well-placed friends such as the Rev. Al Sharpton. Crump worked closely with the civil rights leader in 2006 on another racially charged case—the controversial death of a 14-year-old, African-American inmate of a Florida boot camp.
“I had to call people like Sharpton and a few other black civil rights leaders and the black media to tell them about this story,’’ said Crump. “I had to get them to understand what happened to this young man and what hadn’t happened in his case so they could spread the word.’’
Historically, cases of murder and violence against blacks in the United States rarely have been given the same amount of attention as cases in which the victims of crime are white—and often go unnoticed and unprosecuted.
Just days after hearing the details of Trayvon’s death, Sharpton arranged to have Crump and the teenager’s parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, on his syndicated radio show and his popular MSNBC show, Politics Nation, to tell their story.
(snip)
In the wake of non-stop media attention from the likes of Sharpton and CNN’s Don Lemon concerning the Trayvon Martin case, black media blogs such as MediaTakeOut.com and Huffington Post Black Voices also began publishing accounts and editorials about the Florida case—daily. Almost instantly, readers of all races, ages, and backgrounds began tweeting and posting on Facebook their outrage over how the police have handled the case, and the lack of an arrest in the shooting. To date, almost 1 million people have signed a Change.Org petition to have Zimmerman arrested. In response to the widespread outrage, the Justice Department has opened an investigation into the shooting.
(snip)
Why are they fearful of going before a grand jury, which has a considerably lower burden of proof than a jury?
Defense attorneys are not even present at grand juries.
If you can’t get an indictment, then you ain’t going to get a conviction either, right Angela Cory?
Furthermore, steps in due process should not be skipped just ‘cuz.
Cops who behave criminally should be indicted, convicted and punished.
FR seems to have a severely split personality on this issue.
There are the evil cops who shoot dogs and people who carry guns threads, and then there are the ones about how cops shouldn’t be held to the same standards as anybody else who shoots somebody.
I don’t buy the second argument. Cops should be held to a higher standard than civilians. They volunteered for the job and supposedly are trained and experienced.
Protecting their own lives should NOT be their first objective. That should be protecting the lives of innocents, including those they might shoot by reacting too quickly in a difficult situation.
American cops kill people at a rate 40x that of German cops. Our violent crime rate is about 5x that of Germany.
Cops who misbehave are not only seldom convicted, they’re seldom even punished.
Let’s get body cams out there. Prevent false accusations of police misbehavior and prevent cop misconduct. Win/win.
the term ‘child’ is a bit of a stretch for a 12 yo. Was he a gentle giant?
An appropriate investigation would determine how he had that non-lethal weapon, with its distinguishing marks removed, and if anyone encouraged him to pretend he was shooting people with it.
What isn't being spoken about in the media is what happened on the east side of Cleveland the day before. At one location, five people including two teenagers and a pregnant mother were shot to death. At another location, two young men were found shot to death. The Cleveland police feared they had a serial killer on the loose, and they encounter a 12 year old who looked older than that aiming a real-enough looking non-lethal gun at strangers. Mass murders are uncommon here, and Cleveland's homicides normally are under 100 a year.
What if it had been a serial killer, bringing his evil to Cleveland's diverse west side? All *ell would've broken loose if that happened. It isn't locals who are totally blaming the police. Locals want to get these faux weapons out of the hands of kids who misuse them, and educate them on the dangers. The other call is for police to have body cams. If this thing explodes it will be outside agitation and a black police chief unwilling to speak up against those inciting riot. JMHO
Benjamin Crump is now 0 for 2 on the big stage, isn’t he?
I’m sorry for Tamir. I’ve watched all of the videos.
One thing I know, if I point a “real” looking gun at the cops, I’ll have a hole in my chest that a truck could drive through.
On that video, they say you can watch the car, at first it looks like it zooms into the picture, but someone told me, it was idling previous to that, maybe even on the video and then it roared into action. So first they told the kid to put his hands up.
And I don’t patronize the Police, they have been found to have done plenty of wrongdoing. I tend to defend them but not always.
Good post, thanks for telling us this.
And also, I repeat, I’ve heard people say the cop car in the Tamir Rice video is actually idling and then it comes into the picture. So they were shouting to him to put the gun down, that’s on record.
It’s a shame that the police either had poor training or violated their training by pulling up within a few FEET of a reported possibly armed individual. The officer driving put his partner in a virtual no-win situation by reducing officer reaction time to less than 5 seconds. The driver should have been terminated on the spot. The officer that fired the fatal shots is most likely done in law enforcement no matter what the legal outcome is. In reality the officer that fired was justified in shooting only because of the position his partner placed him in.....
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