Minnesota ICE

What happened in Minneapolis yesterday? It depends on the question asked.

There will be an extensive investigation. Multiple witness statements will be taken, physical evidence will be examined, an autopsy will be performed, the officer’s blood or urine will be tested for drugs or alcohol, and all available videos will be scrutinized frame-by-frame. Various experts will be consulted, and they may well state conflicting opinions. It would be irresponsible for any government or political official to announce conclusions prior to the end of the investigation.

Okay, so apparently there are no reasonable officials in Minnesota, and everyone is (pardon the expression) shooting from the hip. If they can do it, any blogger worth his salt must dive in. After all, I’ve seen a 4-second video.

Question One: Did the deceased driver try to hit the officer with her car? Or, to slightly rephrase it, if she had not been shot and driven away, would she have been charged with trying to hit the officer? Answer: probably not. The video doesn’t show her eyes, but the most likely scenario is that at the moment she accelerated, her focus was on the officer trying to grab her through her driver’s side window. She went in the direction of the other officer, only a couple of feet before turning right to go up the street. If she had not been shot and had gotten away, it is doubtful a reasonable prosecutor would have charged her with assaulting the officer. I say that even though it appears the car actually did make contact with the officer an instant before the shots. If she had not been shot, the likely charges would have been only misdemeanor resisting or interfering.

Question Two: Should the officer be charged with a crime? Short Answer: No. Long Answer: A reasonable prosecutor will conclude she would be unable to prove that the officer did not have a reasonable fear of being hit with the car if he did not fire his weapon.

The first point here is that there is no evidence of any motive other than self-defense. To assert otherwise is a tough sell. Only a politicized prosecutor would assert the gun was fired for some other reason, such as hatred of protesters. Absent evidence of the officer vocalizing such hatred earlier, such a prosecution argument is a non-starter.

But, even if the belief in the need for self-defense was genuine, it must still be reasonable. Otherwise, a Manslaughter charge is appropriate. This question of reasonableness will be the crux of most of the investigation.

On this question of reasonableness, the driver’s intentions are not relevant. The key is the officer’s perception of the car’s movements. The car’s first movement was a backward turn, which suddenly put the officer in the direction the car was pointing. Before that backwards turn, the officer was safely on the passenger’s side of the car. At that time, the officer unholstered his weapon. Then the car accelerates forward. At this time a number of things are happening simultaneously: 1) The car turns away from the officer and goes down the street. 2) The car actually strikes the officer. But, the car was not moving fast enough to inflict serious injury. He is hit by the front driver's side corner of the vehicle. The contact occurred as the car was turning away from the officer, who then shifted position due to the contact but was not knocked to the ground. 3) The fatal shot was fired.

The driver can, of course, be criticized for any number of things. She was not innocently in the wrong place at the wrong time. She intentionally positioned her car in a manner designed to impede the officers. She intentionally refused to obey any demands or directions from the officers. She was, in fact, committing a crime before she accelerated, and the acceleration itself constituted a new crime. But, again, none of that is very relevant to the issue of the reasonableness of the officer’s fear. There was a lot of verbal back and forth. If the driver made threats, that would be relevant.

All the videos will be analyzed frame-by-frame in an effort to put into sequence actions that were happening at the same time. All that effort will make little difference. This event did not happen in slow motion. If things were happening too fast to process, then a person’s fear of what would happen next is reasonable. It appears likely that the fatal shot was fired a split second after the car finished its contact with the officer and was starting to head away from the officer. However, the critical act was the decision to fire. That decision was made as the car was about to hit the officer.

Regardless of the final timeline, the prosecution can not prove unreasonableness beyond a reasonable doubt. Everything happened too fast.

Bottom line: no prosecution, no internal administrative discipline.

G-Pub

PS: Notwithstanding the above. A civil wrongful death suit will surely be filed. Furthermore, one, two, or three years from now, a responsible federal official may decide to settle the case with a substantial payout. The burden of proof is mere preponderance of the evidence in civil cases, and the defense could wisely opt to avoid a Minnesota jury trial. In a civil case, plaintiff's counsel has much to work with. A defense verdict is not a certainty.

PPS: Minnesota officials can huff and puff, but there will be no state prosecution of this federal officer who was performing his official duties at the time of the event. When push comes to shove, the feds win.

UPDATE: A new fact added. The shooting officer was himself dragged down the street by a protester's vehicle a few weeks ago. His actual subjective motivation may well have been to save a fellow officer from suffering the same (potentially deadly) fate. Again, any prosecutor would have a difficult time trying to prove that such a motivation was unreasonable beyond a reasonable doubt.