Yes, I've seen it. Not sure what to make of it though. I really don't care if he was dealing, or about the race angle, or if the warrant was valid or not, or if the jury didn't like his attorney (c'mon, do you really think jurors in the South are purely evil and convict without believing guilt?).
I guess what it comes down to for me is whether the police were announcing themselves. I'm pretty much a believer that knock and announces usually boil down to a tap and a whisper followed 15 seconds later with the door being bashed down while the suspect is asleep. However, you'd have to be a pretty stupid officer to fail to break down the front door and then spend some time banging on the back without yelling "Police!" at the top of your lungs. I'm not saying that they did yell it because I wasn't there and we all know dumb things happen in the heat of the moment. The problem is that we'll never know.
I may be skeptical of an initial entry knock and announce (after all, the point of doing all this at night is to catch the occupant asleep and if the announcement wakes him the occupant might have time to get to the pistol in his night stand), but officers I've met are bright and trained enough to realize that they'd lost the element of surprise when the initial entry failed. At this point the only intelligent thing to do is start bellowing. The thing that makes me wonder is that the officer killed wasn't part of the task force. It's possible that he rabbited through the door before the task force members started to yell. However, as I stated above, we'll never know because we weren't there.
I've no reason to doubt you were/are an honest LE officer. There are many, many honest people in LE. I think the operative question is whether you ever worked with anyone in LE, or knew anyone in LE, or heard about anyone in LE, who did not so respect the knock-and-announce rule (or at least, did not always respect it).
I have to think you'd be hard-pressed to answer that question in the negative--though, really, there's no way for us to confirm or deny your response, in any event. Certainly, if you were to say that no officers deviate from department policy, it would conflict with my own years of experience as a criminal defense attorney, as well as most Americans' experience in their own professions: there are always folks who don't think the rules apply to them, or don't properly understand the rules, or justify in their own minds breaking the rules on occasion, or are simply not competent enough to employ whatever rules they operate under effectively and comprehensively.
Frankly, Ken, it won't surprise you to find that I'm not very moved by the series of straw-men set up by Seth, the public defender who is as viscerally anti-DP as I am pro-DP. It's clearly an advocacy piece intermingled with alot of flowing language (Seth is, after all, a poet-lawyer), but short on facts.
I won't engage his arguments; they've been addressed adequately in many places, including my own blog.
I think it does little, however, to tag DP proponents as for "death" as though we worshipped Moloch... it's a cheap rhetorical device that ignores the principled reasons why DP supporters advocate careful use of the death penalty for convicted murderers. It is not death that motivates us, but justice.
It would be just as unfair for me to mischaracterize my opponent's view as "pro-criminal" or "pro-murderer." I recognize there is a legitimate ground for reasoned disagreement with my view; why can't these anti-DP afford the same consideration to my views, which, after all, are borne up by some 6,000 years of Western moral and legal reasoning and are not just the cause du jour.
6 comments:
Have you discussed the Cory Maye case? Theagitator has been discussing it at length. I was wondering what you and Tom thought about the case.
Yes, I've seen it. Not sure what to make of it though. I really don't care if he was dealing, or about the race angle, or if the warrant was valid or not, or if the jury didn't like his attorney (c'mon, do you really think jurors in the South are purely evil and convict without believing guilt?).
I guess what it comes down to for me is whether the police were announcing themselves. I'm pretty much a believer that knock and announces usually boil down to a tap and a whisper followed 15 seconds later with the door being bashed down while the suspect is asleep. However, you'd have to be a pretty stupid officer to fail to break down the front door and then spend some time banging on the back without yelling "Police!" at the top of your lungs. I'm not saying that they did yell it because I wasn't there and we all know dumb things happen in the heat of the moment. The problem is that we'll never know.
TWM,
I may be skeptical of an initial entry knock and announce (after all, the point of doing all this at night is to catch the occupant asleep and if the announcement wakes him the occupant might have time to get to the pistol in his night stand), but officers I've met are bright and trained enough to realize that they'd lost the element of surprise when the initial entry failed. At this point the only intelligent thing to do is start bellowing. The thing that makes me wonder is that the officer killed wasn't part of the task force. It's possible that he rabbited through the door before the task force members started to yell. However, as I stated above, we'll never know because we weren't there.
TWM,
I've no reason to doubt you were/are an honest LE officer. There are many, many honest people in LE. I think the operative question is whether you ever worked with anyone in LE, or knew anyone in LE, or heard about anyone in LE, who did not so respect the knock-and-announce rule (or at least, did not always respect it).
I have to think you'd be hard-pressed to answer that question in the negative--though, really, there's no way for us to confirm or deny your response, in any event. Certainly, if you were to say that no officers deviate from department policy, it would conflict with my own years of experience as a criminal defense attorney, as well as most Americans' experience in their own professions: there are always folks who don't think the rules apply to them, or don't properly understand the rules, or justify in their own minds breaking the rules on occasion, or are simply not competent enough to employ whatever rules they operate under effectively and comprehensively.
Seth
Frankly, Ken, it won't surprise you to find that I'm not very moved by the series of straw-men set up by Seth, the public defender who is as viscerally anti-DP as I am pro-DP. It's clearly an advocacy piece intermingled with alot of flowing language (Seth is, after all, a poet-lawyer), but short on facts.
I won't engage his arguments; they've been addressed adequately in many places, including my own blog.
I think it does little, however, to tag DP proponents as for "death" as though we worshipped Moloch... it's a cheap rhetorical device that ignores the principled reasons why DP supporters advocate careful use of the death penalty for convicted murderers. It is not death that motivates us, but justice.
It would be just as unfair for me to mischaracterize my opponent's view as "pro-criminal" or "pro-murderer." I recognize there is a legitimate ground for reasoned disagreement with my view; why can't these anti-DP afford the same consideration to my views, which, after all, are borne up by some 6,000 years of Western moral and legal reasoning and are not just the cause du jour.
"anti-DP folks afford the same...."
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