When there's a lack of firm,complete evidence it does.Do we know exactly what happened...*everything* that happened...from start to finish? I doubt it.Remember the Rodney King video? There were two versions...the long one and the short one.The short one showed what looked like a pretty ugly example of police "overreaction".The long version suggests that King just might have had it coming.
I am not at all convinced that we know the whole story.I'm gonna wait and see before I make up my mind.
No scenario backs a cop shooting a guy in the back 5 times when he is not a threat to anyone. Period, end of story.
The background of the shooter might very well have considerable bearing on the sentence if found guilty, as aggravating or mitigating circumstances.
But it simply has nothing to do with whether the shooting was justified or not.
The Rodney King beating was (somewhat) justified by the earlier portion of the video, and FTM by the fact that they were attempting to subdue a resisting man.
I challenge you or anybody else to construct a scenario in which the North Charleston shooting is justified. Can’t be done, IMO.
So unless you can come up with a fictional justification, let’s stop pretending a real one might exist.
“I am not at all convinced that we know the whole story.I’m gonna wait and see before I make up my mind. “
That’s not an unreasonable stance. We don’t know the whole story. We never do until the trial. But the video alone, no matter the prior circumstances, does in fact show the murder of an unarmed man (who we know was originally stopped for nothing more than a broken tail light) who’s being shot 5 times in the back at 50 feet as he runs away from an unharmed cop. NOTHING that occurred prior to that justifies what happened in the video. Nothing.
There are huge differences between this case and your analogy.
I don’t recall the officers taking down PCP boy planting a weapon on his corpse even in the short video, and even in the short video it was clear that Rodney King was a huge muscular man in early adulthood. This was a fat middle aged guy. A fat guy who was not going to physically match the officer in question one on one.
Now, you make it clear that the whole weapon planting thing doesn’t make a difference to you, but it does to a lot of us who evaluate each case individualy.
This guy wasn’t committing assault when he died like Mike Brown or Trayvon Martin. Planted evidence would have convinced me, had the officer who planted it not been filmed planting it. But he was, and he wrote a false report before the video was released which pretty much proves obstruction of justice.
I have no respect for any creep defending our little Judge Dredd here.