Posted on 06/27/2007 6:22:28 PM PDT by CAWats
SAN BERNARDINO - A former sheriff's deputy on trial for shooting an unarmed suspect at the end of a car chase softly cried this afternoon as his attorney pleaded one last time with jurors to acquit him of attempted voluntary manslaughter and assault with a firearm charges.
Ivory J. Webb Jr. wiped tears from his eyes as his attorney, Michael Schwartz, finished his closing argument during Webb's trial in San Bernardino Superior Court.
In the final words of that argument, Schwartz compared Webb to a bird trapped in a cage, and asked jurors to allow the former deputy to return to a normal life, to return to his family.
"Do the right thing," Schwartz said. "Set him free. Not guilty on both counts."
Webb is charged with attempted voluntary manslaughter and assault with a firearm in connection with the Jan. 29, 2006 shooting of Elio Carrion. Carrion was the passenger in a Corvette that led Webb on a high-speed chase. The chase ended when the driver crashed on Francis Street in Chino, prompting Webb to hold the car's two occupants at gunpoint. A nearby resident caught the subsequent shooting on tape. The tape appears to show Webb shoot Carrion as Carrion complies with the deputy's orders to get off the ground.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailybulletin.com ...
It was on the same page as the story. Someone put up a link to it. I dont’ know how to do anything like that so maybe someone out there can do it for you. You should see it though.
If they were smart, they'd check every incident this rouge cop was involved in where he was the only witness. Odds are this is not his first time dealing dirty justice.
There are a lot of jobs in the Army, and I'm sure they can find one for him in Iraq that involves lots of hard labor, sweat in the desert sun, etc. Thus freeing up a genuine patriot to do something else.
And even if they can't find something he can do with competence, there are sand dunes that probably need shifting out of the way, one grain at a time. That should give him plenty of time to contemplate where he went wrong. And if all else fails, they can use him to find land mines... the old fashioned way.
You just don’t understand. This guy is a criminal. The army is not a place for criminals. He can’t be trusted - you need to be able to trust your buddies. I wouldn’t trust this POS around the corner with a sack of sh.. he is a murderer and should be executed
I don’t think you’re catching the sarcasm and irony embedded in my posts.
obviously not
A surviving driver in a scenario would, in fact, be charged with killing. Along with the occifer. The guilt is not either/or it's both/and.
I would expect to have seen an insanity defense in such a case. The occifer didn't react to the video by "I must have been crazy, I didn't see that" instead he whined the same old blue song.
The world turned upside down.
Yes, I think “temporary insanity” is actually what probably happened here. The officer assumed (not unreasonably) based on the fact that the car’s driver was leading him on a high speed chase, that the occupants were desperate criminals. So when the passenger got out, the officer interpreted every move he made in the worse possible light, based on the assumption that he was a desperate criminal. The officer was scared, based on the assumption that he was dealing with desperate criminals, and that fear prevented him from absorbing the new evidence that was emerging after the passenger was out of the car — i.e. that the passenger was NOT behaving like a desperate criminal.
The video is a confusing, dark scene, with background noise and poor audio. It’s not at all clear to me that the officer wasn’t saying “Don’t get up”, though obviously what the victim heard was “Get up”. I don’t the details of police training, so I’m not in a position to say whether, if the officer was in fact saying “Don’t get up”, that was in clear conflict with what he’d been trained to do. I know it SHOULD be in clear conflict with he’d been trained to do — though when someone is fearing for their life, “training” will naturally give way to instinct and speech habits from everyday life are likely to be employed. But law enforcement officers SHOULD be trained always to give commands in the positive, when at all possible, simply because in the chaos which naturally accompanies many crime and arrest scenes, one word can easily be missed by the hearer. If an officer wants to communicate to someone not to get up, he should be staying “Stay down”, not “Don’t get up”.
At any rate, I tend to think this officer’s intentions probably weren’t criminal. Even assuming he wasn’t considering that someone might be videotaping the scene, or even just watching and prepared to testify, any time a police officer shoots someone, there is going to be a big investigation, assignment to desk duty for the duration of the investigation, etc. In the absence of some direct history between the officer and the victim and/or driver (which as far as I know hasn’t been alleged), I can’t imagine why an officer would want to bring that on himself. Now if he KNOWS who his target is, and knows this is the guy who shot his partner a couple of years ago and got off, or who forces little girls into prostitution, sure emotion can get the better of reason and an officer could shoot with criminal intent. I just can’t think of any reason why this particular victim would have been singled out by this officer for attempted cold-blooded murder.
Yes, there are bad cops out there, but they tend to be quite careful in how they go about perpetrating criminal acts, not just randomly go around shooting strangers. And they tend to be doing it for personal gain, not just for the heck of it. I.e., if they’re “on the take”, they may perpetrate cold-blooded murder to prevent someone from reporting and/or testifying about this. I think the majority of cops are good cops, but I know we have trouble recruiting enough people to serve on our city and state police forces who are both fully competent and scrupulously honest. Failing to give the benefit of the doubt in cases where there IS reasonable doubt, only makes that problem worse, since prospective police officers consider what effects a career as a police officer is going to have on their lives. They always have to consider the risk factor, that they may get shot and killed by a criminal when responding to a call. Plenty take a pass on the job just for that reason. Then you add in the ones who arrest an obvious thug who happens to be black, and get hit with a racial discrimination suit, and end up getting their modest pay garnished for the rest of their lives to pay off the thug, another whole raft of good prospective officers decide “No, I don’t need that” (and believe me, that scenario is very real, and very well known in the sort of neighborhoods where young men often serious consider careers as city police officers).
Webb certainly needs to find a new line of work (and I don’t know that he arguing otherwise), but I’m not at all sure he deserves to rot in prison where he’ll get beat up and raped by thugs for a few years. And I’m pretty sure that civilized society will end up paying a hefty price if he does, through the effects of a few more genuinely bad people getting police jobs, after a few more good ones look at a case like this and decide to take a pass. Some years back (don’t know of it’s still true now, but I think not), recruiting police officers for Washington DC was so difficult, that the department had actually hired some people who had murder convictions on their records, simply for lack of any better qualified applicants. Civilized people just weren’t interested in the job, and who can blame them. But of course, things only went downhill in Washington, when convicted murderers started taking up spots on the police force.
Cold blooded killer or officer panicked
I am a law abiding citizen and I am sorry to say, I do not have alot of trust in the police.
“...I do not have alot of trust in the police.”
I understand that. I have witnessed numerous events that would work against that trust. I have also been on several juries, including a jury in a first degree murder trial, and have seen reasons to distrust either because of incompetence or because of lack of truthfulness or because of “being out to get someone”.
On the other hand, I know many in law enforcement whom I do trust, and could cite numeorous reasons for that trust. Knowing there are those you may not want to trust out there, however, makes one very cautous.
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