Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 14:03:46 -0400 To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com> From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com> Subject: Death by cop Colorado police shoot civilians - lots of them Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2001 22:03:31 -0700 From: spiker <spiker@ev1.net> Subject: Death by cop Colorado police shoot civilians - lots of them
Source: Boulder Weekly http://www.boulderweekly.com/
Death by cop Colorado police shoot civilians - lots of them. So many, in fact, that this year the state may surpass the Texas death chamber in its number of executions. http://www.boulderweekly.com/archive/082301/coverstory.html
by Eric J. Ross (Editorial@boulderweekly.com)
[Photo] http://www.boulderweekly.com/archive/082301/images/cover082301.jpg
The Execution Machine in Texas stalled temporarily this month while Americans debated whether killing convicted murderer Napolean Beasley would be appropriate in light of the fact he was only 17 at the time of the murder. That leaves the running total of 11 convicted Texas murderers executed this year. Six more are scheduled to die before the end of 2001, barring judicial stays, pardons or commutations. This slowdown may be the lucky break that the Colorado executioners seem to be looking for in their quest to surpass Texas and earn the state a new title: Execution State.
Say what? Some of the more erudite readers might ask how that can be, considering the fact that Colorado has officially put to death only one person in the last 30 years through legal channels-Gary Davis in 1997.
The state of Texas, meanwhile, has become best known for its desire to convict and kill violent murderers. But in Texas, unlike Colorado, the Judicial system actually bothers with all the trouble and expense of what lawyers and legal scholars refer to as "due process"-probable cause, warrants signed by judges, lawful arrest, reasonable bail, free legal defense counsel, preliminary hearings, motions, pleadings, trials by a jury of peers, comprehensive pre-sentencing reports, learned Judges presiding over it all, post conviction sentences within legislatively approved guidelines, the requisite appeals of conviction etc., etc., and etc. These are the little checks and balances that our justice system tries to place as obstacles and deterrents to one of the greatest tragedies that our country tolerates: the obscenity of wrongfully convicting an innocent person.
The requirements of due process aren't always enough. As proven in Illinois in recent years-where a pro-death penalty governor ordered executions to stop-states have been incarcerating far too many innocent and wrongfully convicted people. Since the advent of DNA identification in law enforcement-a practice instituted in the late 1980s-hundreds of innocent people serving hard time have been exonerated and set free. The National Institute of Justice reported that as many as 10 percent of the inmates in the United States may be factually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. The Innocence Project at Cardozo School of Law has helped reverse the convictions of dozens of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted; many of these people have been locked in prison cells for decades of their lives. These innocent people cannot get the huge portions of their stolen lives back, but at least they are free and still alive.
In Colorado, a growing number of suspects never see a courtroom or a jail. Events of this summer have made it painfully clear that some Colorado cops shoot first and ask questions later; and possibly without consequences for the policemen responsible. The suspects get no representation, no trial, no appeal, no reprieve, no chance of reversal.
While Texas has executed 11 people lawfully this year, cops in Colorado have killed 11 on the streets.
Wild West justice It's not as if Colorado citizens and politicians haven't tried to use a system more similar to the process in Texas. It's just that they've failed. When the U.S. Supreme Court revalidated the Death Penalty in 1976, Colorado politicians quickly began thirsting for its application. In 1984 the Colorado Legislature revised the law to allow executions in capital murder cases.
The Colorado death chamber was dusted off after a nine-year hiatus, and people waited eagerly for its use. But a funny thing happened on the way: Due process, in the form of juries. In Colorado, juries not only decided the guilt or innocence of the defendant, but also decided whether those they convicted should be killed, or imprisoned for life. Juries showed an overwhelming reluctance to execute, even after sitting through trials involving gory evidence and listening to the agony of grieving survivors. This enraged the politicians and frustrated the would-be executioners. So in 1996 the Colorado Legislature, strongly supported by the Colorado District Attorneys, decided to take the decision away from the 12 jurors who witnessed the trial and stack the deck in favor of the state.
They concocted a new method of sentencing, something they were sure would result in more deaths. The plan was to place the life or death decision solely in the hands of three-judge panels. Surely, hand-picked dispassionate judges would be more willing to fry convicted murderers than timid jurors who had come face-to-face daily-sometimes for weeks on end during a trial-with the people they were supposed to have killed.
So in 1995 the three-judge tribunal was established by the legislature to decide who gets death after being convicted of capital murder. It was yet another unexpected setback for those who would make Colorado more like Texas. Lo and behold, the wise and learned judges just weren't concluding that many of the capital cases before them that were deserving of death. In fact, they were coming to much the same conclusions that the old juries were. In response, the legislature threatened again to alter the system and turn over the sentencing decision in each capital conviction to just one judge. So far, the one-judge proposals-sure to result in more legal executions-have failed.
But those who favor the swift execution of convicts need not despair entirely. With none of the buildup, none of the drama, none of the average 10 years of due process, these people are seeing suspects-not convicts-get shot routinely throughout the state. In the past 12 months, mostly this summer, Colorado cops have shot 21 people, 11 of whom are dead. The nature of the alleged crimes is diverse, ranging from serious assaults to shoplifting to sitting peacefully in one's own home, watching TV while the emergency 911 system misfires.
Of the hundreds of thousands of federal, state and local laws on the books in the United States, only two-premeditated murder and treason-can result in the option of capital punishment upon conviction.
Although capital punishment requires a seemingly endless cycle of checks, balances and due process, executions by cops require nothing but a feeling on the part of the gun-toting officer. Under state law, one needs only to interact with a cop, and that cop needs only to "fear" for his life in order to be authorized to shoot to kill. Whether he's in "fear," and therefore justified to shoot, is entirely up to him. Internal investigations of police shootings come down to this:
Interrogator: "Did you fear for your life?"
Cop: "Yes, lieutenant, I thought he might run over me."
Cars have been declared "deadly weapons" without much, if any, scrutiny from the media or the public. As a weapon it makes a rather poor and cumbersome choice if one is intent on harming or killing a specific person. Visualize an old western-style showdown. You, in your car, are a mere 20 paces from your opponent. He has a loaded gun. Ready, set, go! Bet heavily on the gun.
But being anywhere in a car can give the cops authority to kill you, if they happen to be anywhere near or around your car. It doesn't matter what "crime" you may be suspected of at this point. It could be anything or no crime at all. Scare a cop, even by accident, and he can kill you with near absolute impunity.
Trained to kill Cops always shoot to kill. Gabe Suarez, an LA cop and author of The Tactical Pistol: Advanced Gunfighting Concepts and Techniques, believes that it's unwise and unethical for an officer to shoot to disable a suspect. His book argues that police should only shoot when they feel their lives, or the lives of civilians, are imminently at risk. And when shooting a would-be killer, who's going to murder before he can be subdued, no risk should be taken. If injured, the suspect will only be angry and is likely to take a cop or civilian with him to the grave. Injured, Suarez argues, a dangerous suspect will do anything to kill. So he, and others who teach cops how to shoot, try to instill a two-to-the-chest, one to-the-head model. Suarez recommends that police plug a suspect twice in the chest, then aim the gun directly at the suspect's head. If the head is in the sights, pull the trigger. If it's not, then the two to the chest put him down.
When someone shot by a cop doesn't die, it is merely a reflection of the ballistic incompetence of the officer or just a freak stroke of luck, and not because the cop intended to spare a life.
How threatening must one be to receive two bullets to the heart?
Again, it comes down to how an officer feels. More technically, however, the officer is on less shaky ground if the suspect is within 21 feet of the cop. It's not state law, but an arbitrary guideline established by Denver's police trainers. They have established an imaginary 21-foot circle around each cop. They have said publicly that a suspect moving toward an officer with a weapon available, even a tire iron or screwdriver-or any object that can be construed as a weapon-must be dropped with lethal force.
By following the arbitrary mechanical dogma of the training manual, police are immune when they use lethal force.
The issue, then is one of morality, not legality. Simply because a cop "may" legally kill a suspect, the question becomes: "Must" he kill the suspect? That semantic nuance, and the wisdom and discretion to choose between them, is what many say separates the truly corageous cop from the trigger-happy robocop. However, the moral fortitude of some cops provides little protection for Colorado citizens.
Under Colorado law, the legal standard for self-defense is exactly the same for cops as it is for citizens. In order to use deadly force against an assailant legally, one must be in "imminent danger" of being killed or of receiving great bodily injury. While police have certain special powers of arrest and apprehension, the legal requirement for justifiably killing another person in self-defense is exactly the same as it is for any other citizen. In practice, it rarely happens that way. The legal standard that must be met before anyone can kill another is high and should be so in a civilized society. Some disagree with this concept and expect that the standard should be even higher for professionally-trained, full-time law enforcers. But the police have the same rights to self-defense as you or I do.
So when you read reports of justifiable lethal force and wonder about their legitimacy, ask yourself: Would the actions appear reasonable if an average citizen, standing in the cop's shoes, did the exact same thing?
The body count The number of killings by cops in Colorado, or anywhere in the United States, is not an easy statistic to obtain. It's actually a statistical black hole, one resulting from blind trust in law enforcement coupled with the lack of required accountability-an historical recipe for trouble.
One reason given for the absence of these statistics-unlike other crime data, which is copious-is that law-enforcement officialdom doesn't consider the shooting of a suspect to be a crime. Never. Not ever, based on the wording of a U.S. Justice Department-Bureau of Justice Statistics report.
When it comes to lethal force by police against citizens, the city of Denver ranks as one of the deadliest cities, based on extensive research by the Washington Post.
Nationwide, Denver ranked in the top 10 in measurements of fatal shootings per 100,000 residents; in the top 10 in fatal shootings per 1,000 police officers; in the top 10 in fatal shootings per 1,000 arrests for violent crimes; in the top 10 in fatal shootings per 100 murders; and ranked second in fatal shootings per 10,000 violent crimes.
But statewide, no single agency keeps or collates such data. Boulder Weekly's calls to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the State Attorney General, and the Governor's office were met with "we don't keep those statistics." The Colorado Bureau of Investigation responded with: "we have no idea" how many times Colorado cops shot or killed someone this year. The law does not mandate that such important data be compiled or kept, much less analyzed. One has to rely heavily on news media coverage throughout the state, trusting that all incidents of lethal force are known to reporters and subsequently published.
According to a story titled "When Cops Shoot, Who's Counting?" in the New York Times, this absence of meaningful statistics is a nationwide problem. In the April 29 story, reporter Fox Butterfield wrote:
"Despite widespread public interest and a provision in the 1994 Crime Control Act requiring the Attorney General to collect the data and publish an annual report on the statistics, police shootings and use of non-deadly force continue to be piecemeal products of spotty collection, and are dependent on the (voluntary) cooperation of local police departments. No comprehensive accounting of all the nation's 17,000 police departments exists."
In the 1980s, the International Chiefs of Police, a police organization, tried to collect such information. But members of the organization didn't like what they saw.
"The figures were very embarrassing to a lot of police departments" said James Fyfe, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University and a former New York cop, in the Times.
In Colorado, no law requires that shootings or killings by police be investigated by outside agencies, much less analyzed. Some metro agencies use outside "shoot teams" to investigate when one of their own shoots or kills a citizen. These investigative teams are usually comprised of law enforcement members from the surrounding jurisdictions.
At the whim of the agency involved in each shooting, the use of outside investigators is completely optional and discretionary. Many times they simply investigate themselves. If they do call a shoot team, the investigators do not have authority or jurisdictional control, says Linda Holloway, a CBI shoot team investigator. The team or its findings can be dismissed or denied access, Holloway says, at the whim of the agency involved in a shooting.
A few departments in Colorado, and throughout the country, voluntarily send their data on shootings by cops to the FBI. The statistics end up in an annual report by the US department of Justice crime statistics division that's labeled "Justifiable Homicide of Felons by Police." In other words, all reported shootings are "justifiable," and all those shot are felons. The federal government has official knowledge of exactly zero instances in which a police officer unlawfully shot a suspect.
The report explains:
"When a police officer deliberately kills someone, a determination is made as to whether the homicide was justified to prevent the imminent death or serious bodily injury to the officer or another person. If an investigation determines that the homicide did occur in the line of duty and that circumstances did warrant lethal force, a record of a justifiable homicide is voluntarily sent by the officer's agency to the FBI in Washington. Each record of justifiable homicide is then entered into the database."
This leaves the reader of this report with a few questions, such as: What happened to the non-justifiable or questionable killings of "felons" by police? What happened to the non-justifiable or questionable killing of misdemeanor offenders by police? What happened to the non-justifiable or questionable killings of traffic offenders by police? What happened to the murders of civilians by police?
Answer: The victor gets to write the history books.
The introduction to the report seems to make mockery of the data, stating:
"In this report, killings by police are referred to as 'justifiable homicides,' and the persons that police kill are referred to as 'felons.' These terms reflect the view of the police agencies that provide the data used in this report."
Reread that. Let it sink in. Why are all killings by police justified? Because the police say so in every single case they ever report. Why are all those killed called "felons?" Because the police shot them. The police say they're felons, and they don't need a prosecutor, a judge and a jury to concur.
The "felon" description of all reported suspects who get killed was dubbed "deeply offensive and legally incorrect" by Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska. Even the Justice Department itself was so embarrassed, reports the Times, that it did not send out its usual promotional material trumpeting the report.
In a novel mission to fill this peculiar informational void in the Information Age, a non-profit Internet site and database has been launched to begin a national count. LethalForce.org and DeadlyForce.org will act as national central repositories for all instances of police lethal force in the U.S. The repositories will rely on data sent in by citizens. News media and public watchdog groups will also be invited to submit records of every instance of which they are aware.
Legally, and for all practical purposes, it appears to be obvious and clear that police can shoot suspects, almost at will, without recourse-especially in Colorado. But in this country, at least, citizens are free to keep count. The People will keep count, and will continue to count until each and every instance of lethal force by police is recorded. At the end of all the counting, perhaps the analysis will show no bias or raise no further questions. Perhaps it will turn out that every incident of force by police in the U.S. is indeed "justifiable homicide," just like the Department of Justice claims. Wouldn't that be comforting?
The following provides a look at some of the 21 executions and failed executions that have taken place in Colorado in only the past 12 months.
* Killed Jerry Norris: suspected of watching TV, July 26, two shots David Grodney: suspected of shoplifting July 23, eight shots Joshua Torres: suspected of speeding July 19, three shots *Hakijah Ogobonna: suspected of assault July 18, one shot Christopher Cali: suspected of being suicidal July 17, two shots Christopher Olguin: suspected of assault July 7, one shot *Richard Dutson Jr: suspected of purse snatching July 8, 42 shots Michael Jackson: suspected of assault May 8, one shot Larry Olsen: April 21, aggravated assault, four shots Brandon Meraz: suspected of traffic violations April 14, five *Ascary Macias: suspected of car theft April 14, one shot *Joseph Daniel Martinez: suspected of aggravated assault April 8, two shots *Jamie McIlrath: suspected of acting erratically Mar 14, one shot *David Mercado: suspected of bank robbery Feb. 28, one shot *Brian Pannebaker: suspected of being suicidal Feb. 8, two shots *Abran Lovato: suspected of running Feb. 3, three shots Matthew Arroyo: suspected of car theft Jan. 18 2001, one shot *Bruce Graham: suspected of lighting a fire Oct. 19 2000, four shots Bryant Wynn: suspected of robbery Oct. 18 2000, one shot *Eric Vantslot: suspected of violating restraining order Aug. 29 2000, two shots *Mark Anthony Russell Jr.: suspected of disturbance Aug. 16 2000, one shot
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