[oceanview]

there is no way they can get a fair trial without a change of venue.

[babygene]

This is stupid... Cops need to be held to a higher standard than other people that carry guns, not lower.

[Alberta's Child]

There are some very good points raised in this article, but I believe this case clearly illustrates why a blanket "decriminalization of police judgement" is a bad idea.

The important thing to remember is that this was a classic situation involving police acting in a "preventive" context rather than a "reactive" context. In other words, the police were not on the scene because someone had called them to report a crime; rather, they were there conducting an undercover operation to "get guns off the street," "fight the war on drugs," etc.

There's no way in hell an armed police force -- particularly one in a city where about 99% of all law-abiding citizens are prohibited by law from arming themselves -- should ever be given a blanket exemption in cases where their judgement comes into question like this.

[Smogger]

The article's premise, which I take to be that police officers are treated unfairly or more unfairly than regular citizens by the criminal justice system, doesn't hold water. Police officers are rarely charged with murder or manslaughter and almost always beat it.

[Clemenza]

Besides civil liability for the officer or his department, a further appropriate penalty for severely mistaken force decisions could be firing the officer and decertifying him for future police work.

Sounds sensible, but it still puts our fine civil servants above the (criminal) rule of law.

One can only hope that the officers in the Bell shooting are acquitted.

How about having a TRIAL first Heather!

I used to think that Heather was a moderate libertarian, but her fetish for "lawr and ooor-dah!" makes me question this initial assumption. As a matter of fact, other than "lawr and ooor-dah!" and being tough on terrorists (the latter idea I agree with her wholeheartedly on), I don't see her talking about anything else.

[LambSlave]

If a judge or jury determines that Isnora and Oliver weren’t justified in firing their weapons—and if the prosecutor overcomes the nagging problem that Isnora didn’t even hit Bell—then their actions seem to fit squarely within the definition of manslaughter, at the very least. After all, when Isnora, Oliver, and the other three officers fired their weapons, they did “intend to cause serious physical injury,” to quote New York’s definition of first-degree manslaughter. In the language of police training, they intended to “stop the threat,” and stopping a threat by firing a weapon necessarily means intending to cause serious physical injury, if not death... But such a result clearly represents a miscarriage of justice. Even if an officer is judged, from the safe distance of hindsight, to have miscalculated a risk, it distorts the intention of the criminal law and the meaning of an officer’s actions to equate those actions with a morally reprehensible felony.

Yet they have no problem whatsoever when they do the same damn thing to us peasants, who don't have a fancy police union and the resources of the state to defend us, and the benefit of the doubt from most jurors; as pubic servants they SHOULD be held to higher standard, not a lower one. This just makes me certain that they DO need to be prosecuted more vigorously in cases like this.