The officer taking shots when blinded by blood? These mitigating factors would get cops convicted most likely.
What is this cop shooting? A .22?
If he is brought up on murder charges then it may very well be his strategy. A murder charge requires proving criminal intent. Fear and panic resulting from a beat down by a 295 lb man is a legitimate mitigating factor. I'm not saying Brown deserved to die and I'm not saying that the cop is blameless, but there is a huge legal grey area between innocence and first-degree murder, which is why we have crimes such as "negligent homicide" and "manslaughter" on the books.
Dorian Johnson, Piaget Crenshaw, Tiffany Mitchell, and a yet to be identified twitter user who was posting during the incident, have all said he was shot running away and killed when he turned and surrendered. I'm glad the FBI is involved because turning this over to the St. Louis PD is a joke.
If he was injured and blinded by blood then his thinking may very well have been impaired. It is a documented medical fact that adrenaline interferes with decision-making, judgement and motor skills. Guilty of panic? Yes. Murder? Maybe not.
Real life is not like TV where people get shot once in the chest and drop dead on the spot. Ever kill anything with a gun? I have. On several occasions I have had 200 lb deer run over 100 yards after getting shot thru both lungs and the heart with a .30-06 rifle that hits with 4 or 5 times the ballistic energy of the 9mm or .40 handgun rounds used by police. People on drugs or adrenaline often don't even know that they have been shot and can continue fighting for several minutes before bleeding out.
The assault in the officer was over. Adrenaline and panic are not appropriate defenses. Isn't it just as possible that a cop got his ass kicked and rather than allowing the courts to handle it decided in a blind rage to take that son of a bitch out? Yeah, that won't go over well either.
The first post was at 12:03 pm. It was not an hour later.
And that may very well be the case. We don't know at this point. There are any number of plausible scenarios and various levels of criminal culpability on the part of the officer. The biggest problem I have with this whole situation is the immediate and automatic assumption that the officer was motivated by racism to commit murder simply because he is white. That assumption is racist in and of itself, and does nothing but create a spiral of increasing racism, looting, rioting etc. People need to calm down, open their minds and let the facts be determined in a fair and transparent manner.
I agree, and he should be in jail until then.
If four eyewitnesses said I shot a guy in the back and then executed him when he begged me to stop, I'm sure I'd be free pending an investigation.
