From an August article in The New York Times:
As Officer Wilson got out of his car, the men were running away. The officer fired his weapon but did not hit anyone, according to law enforcement officials.
Read it five times until it sinks in. I had to. I must admit I didn't know about this "little" detail until today, and I'm wondering how many other people are unaware of it. Before I discovered this, I'd been under the impression there were shots in the car and shots after Brown turned around, but no shots in between.
A cop shooting at someone who's running away is downright alarming to me, but I'm not a lawyer, so I imagined the apparent lack of interest in this detail had some legal explanation. I mean, all the armchair psychologists were telling us the robbery footage was indicative of Brown's state of mind, so surely some legal rationale saved this second round of shooting from being used in a probe of Wilson's own psyche.
It turns out there was a somewhat popular diary on Daily Kos back in August:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
But reading the vast majority of the comments in that diary felt as if I'd been transported to Bizarro World, I'm sorry to say. The emphasis was largely on whether the shots actually missed, not what the fuck a cop was doing firing at a fleeing suspect in the first place.
Two-thirds down the page of that diary, in a comment with only three terse replies, is this:
[new] Tennessee v. Garner (27+ / 0-)
the Supreme Court of the United States held that under the Fourth Amendment, when a law enforcement officer is pursuing a fleeing suspect, he or she may use deadly force to prevent escape only if the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others. -- Wikipedia
OK, now we're getting somewhere.
That's where I am now. How does a fleeing Brown, evidently unarmed, "[pose] a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others"?
It's not entirely a rhetorical question. I'm genuinely interested in a legal analysis of this important detail that seems at risk of becoming a footnote.