Legal Insurrection by Stacey Matthews August 29, 2021
Jonathan Turley: Statements By Capitol Police Officer Who Killed Ashli Babbitt ‘Demolish the Two Official Reviews That Cleared Him’
“Under Byrd’s interpretation, hundreds of rioters could have been gunned down on Jan. 6.”
On the heels of the USCP exonerating Byrd, he did an interview with NBC News anchor Lester Holt, identifying himself publicly for the first time.
Instead of clearing things up, the interview only intensified the debate over his actions and whether they were justified. Here’s a key moment from their back and forth:
Video shot by a person in the crowd showed two officers posted in front of the door. Heavily outnumbered, they eventually stepped aside.
Byrd said he had no knowledge that any officers were there. Because of the furniture stacked on his side of the door, he also couldn’t make out how many people were on the other side or whether they were carrying weapons.
“It was impossible for me to see what was on the other side,” he said.
But he did see the person now known to be Babbitt start coming through the broken glass.
“I could not fully see her hands or what was in the backpack or what the intentions are,” Byrd said. “But they had shown violence leading up to that point.”
While the Supreme Court, in cases such as Graham v. Connor, has said that courts must consider “the facts and circumstances of each particular case,” it has emphasized that lethal force must be used only against someone who is “an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and … is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.” Particularly with armed assailants, the standard governing “imminent harm” recognizes that these decisions must often be made in the most chaotic and brief encounters.
Under these standards, police officers should not shoot unarmed suspects or rioters without a clear threat to themselves or fellow officers.
Legal experts and the media have avoided the obvious implications of the two reviews in the Babbitt shooting. Under this standard, hundreds of rioters could have been gunned down on Jan. 6 — and officers in cities such as Seattle or Portland, Ore., could have killed hundreds of violent protesters who tried to burn courthouses, took over city halls or occupied police stations during last summer’s widespread rioting. In all of those protests, a small number of activists from both political extremes showed up prepared for violence and pushed others to riot. According to the DOJ’s Byrd review, officers in those cities would not have been required to see a weapon in order to use lethal force in defending buildings.
More:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/08/jonathan-turley-statements-by-capitol-police-officer-who-killed-ashli-babbitt-demolish-the-two-official-reviews-that-cleared-him/
