Supreme Court: No Lives Matter If a Cop Feels Threatened
It’s official. Black Lives Don’t Matter—and neither do white or brown ones, male or female, if a policeman feels threatened, is rattled by the circumstances, doesn’t like the response he’s getting, or mistakes a cellphone for a Glock 17. There’s an epidemic of that.
In a ruling Monday, a majority of the Supreme Court, in a review of what by all appearances is one of the least justified shootings imaginable, held that law enforcement is almost always right. In Kisela v. Hughes, police in Tucson, Arizona, responded to a call that a woman was hacking at a tree with a knife. When they arrived, Amy Hughes came outdoors holding a kitchen knife at her side. Hughes didn’t respond immediately to requests to drop it. Two officers held back but one saw that as reason to shoot, hitting her four times and leaving her gravely wounded. She survived and sued.
In an unsigned opinion, the court rejected Hughes’ claim of excessive force, saying officers are entitled to immunity unless previous cases clearly tell them a specific use of force is unlawful. True enough, there may not be a previous case where the life of a tree was at stake. But here, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a blistering dissent, found that no one’s life was at stake: Hughes did not raise the knife in the direction of the police, or her roommate. She wasn’t behaving erratically or verbally threatening anyone. The ruling, Sotomayor wrote, shows an “unflinching willingness” to intervene prematurely to wrongly grant immunity.
The decision Sotomayor labeled as “shoot first and ask questions later” comes as police killings are roiling the country. In many cases, victims are unarmed African Americans. With body cameras widely required, it’s no longer just the word of witnesses and families against the police, but the police against what your eyes can see. Watching a black man, Eric Garner, choked to death, gasping “I can’t breathe,” for selling bootleg cigarettes concentrates the mind.
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/supreme-court-no-lives-matter-if-a-cop-feels-threatened?ref=home
7-2. Police State, here we are
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