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Defaulting to the State
Police Ofc. Jeronimo Yanez and Philando Castile.
David French has written twice about the verdict in the Philando Castile case: the first when the verdict came down; then again when the dashcam video was made public. Of Yanez (the officer who shot Castile) he wrote, “he still panicked, and he should have been held accountable. The jury’s verdict was a miscarriage of justice.” After the video was released, he wrote why he believes the verdict came down as it did. “When I saw that palpable panic, I immediately knew why he was acquitted. The unwritten law trumped the statutes on the books. The unwritten law is simple: When an officer is afraid, he’s permitted to shoot.” [emphasis mine]
This is not the only unwritten law we follow in our criminal justice system. We’ve built and operated the entire thing to default to the defendant over the state; some would say we do so to a fault. The idea was first espoused by Voltaire who wrote in 1749, “that ’tis much more Prudence to acquit two Persons, tho’ actually guilty, than to pass Sentence of Condemnation on one that is virtuous and innocent…” which was expanded by Blackstone in 1783 to be “For the law holds, that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer…” and multiplied in 1785 by Benjamin Franklin to read “That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.” When the power of the state is brought to bear on a citizen, we’ve held that it is a greater injustice to imprison the innocent than to set free the guilty. My question is this: does the maxim hold when citizens are holding the state to account?
Jeronimo Yanez did not unholster his weapon as a citizen. He did not fire seven shots lethally into the body of Philando Castile as one either. He did so with the full power and authority of the government. In his interaction with Castile, Yanez was the state. The state killed a citizen for no reason greater than fear. If we default to the side of the citizen in cases where liberty is at stake, then why do we default to the state in cases where life is lost? Why do we follow the unwritten law that when an agent of the state is afraid of a citizen, he is permitted to take the citizen’s life?
Published in Law, Policing
I get where you’re coming from in this, but we’re not just judging an individual vs another individual when one of them wields the power of the state. That power also must be judged. I suppose much of that judgment will be rendered during civil trials.
Paywall, darn it! I think that the NYT article that you link refers to the Castle Rock v. Gonzalezs case, which does not say that a police officer has no duty to protect citizens. It says that a person does not have a Constitutional property interest in police enforcement of a protective order that can be enforced in a civil action for damages under 42 USC sec. 1983.
Read broadly, the Castle Rock case means, at most, that a person cannot bring a civil suit for damages alleging a Constitutional violation as a result of a police officer’s alleged failure to protect the person. There may be other remedies, including civil suits under state law for negligence.
Here’s a link to an Arizona Supreme Court case, Hutcherson v. City of Phoenix, upholding a $1.7 million verdict for negligence against the police for failing to timely respond to a 911 call, resulting in a double-murder.
However, that is exactly what Warren v District of Columbia holds.
Followed by
Emphasis added.