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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, that makes sense. Hire a guy who’s 0 for 2 and expect a different result.
As far as I know this race pimp is 0/2 on convictions and has yet to extract a dime civilly. What kind of fool would hire this clown? This was another case where I found police actions suspect but now that this Crump scumbag is on the scene I am willing to believe the cops were in the right.
He was probably not a bad kid, relatively speaking. But he did such a terribly stupid thing. What choice did the cops have?
I know personally a family who lost a son to a police shooting. He was a big guy, 19, in a halfway house for mentally ill kids when he picked up a kitchen knife and threatened the director. She called the cops. He went running out the door at the cops wielding the knife and threatening to kill himself and them . On the 15-foot sidewalk, the cops made the choice to shoot, killed him on the spot. Very charming parents wondered publicly why they couldn’t have shot him in the arm or knees, but they brought no charges.
The family is upscale CA liberal, but no lawsuit. Very little press coverage outside of Marin County, where they live. I don’t even think the SanFran papers covered it, or covered it for more than a day or two, certainly no front page headlines. Oh yeah, the kid/family were white.