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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: The Verdict: Murder as an Official Entitlement “Among other lessons we’ve learned in this trial,” pontificated Judge William Froeberg just before a jury acquitted Kelly Thomas’s killers, “is that violence begets violence.” This statement was either a conscious lie, or a symptom of incurable ideological blindness. The murderous violence directed at Kelly Thomas by a half-dozen police officers was unilateral, unprovoked, and utterly unjustified. It wasn’t begotten by anything Thomas had done, or failed to do. It was purely a manifestation of the criminal impulses that are nurtured within those who belong to the State’s punitive caste – and then directed without stint or limit against those who refuse to submit to the “authority” of those privileged bullies. “These peace officers did their jobs — they did what they were trained to do,”insisted John Barnett, the police union lawyer who represented Manuel Ramos during the trial. Immediately after the acquittal, Officer Jay Cincincelli – who, like Ramos, was fired following the public outcry after the Kelly Thomas killing – announced that he would seek to get his job back. Given that the Fullerton PD initially defended the officers’ actions, and their training officer insisted that the attack on Thomas followed established procedures, Cincinelli has every reasonable expectation of being rehired. During his summation to the jury, attorney Michael D. Schwartz, who represented Cincinelli, likewise insisted that the unremitting assault on Thomas was carried out in strict fidelity to the “training” the officers had received. “The officer has the right to pursue the suspect until the suspect is controlled – that’s how my client was trained,” Schwartz told the jury. From his perspective, this both explained and justified Cincinelli’s use of his Taser as a club, with which – in the assailant’s own words – he “smashed [the victim’s] face to hell.” Schwartz exhorted the jury to “analyze this case without the emotion.” By this he meant suppressing the human tendency to empathize with the victim; he decidedly did not want the jury to set aside the irrational belief that aggressive violence is morally appropriate when committed in the name of the State. Once matters of identity are subtracted from the incident, we’re left with the spectacle of a solitary, unarmed, terrified individual being beaten and suffocated beneath more than a half-ton of armed, aggressive strangers. There is no rational basis for describing this as anything other than criminal homicide. The only way the jury could conclude otherwise would be to accept the premise that police officers, as agents of government-imposed “order,” have an unqualified license to kill any Mundane who resists their aggressive violence. A codicil to that license dictates that police who kill a Mundane who tries to defend himself must be regarded as victims. “Listen to them during the fight,” Barnett urged the jury, maintaining the pretense that an act of mass violence against a solitary victim somehow constitutes a “fight.” “You don’t think they thought they were in the fight of their lives? Do you think that they called a bunch of cops there … to come watch them and help them beat down some homeless person? Do you think that’s what happened?” The video recording of the event makes it unambiguously clear that this is precisely what happened. The thrust of the defense argument was that police are given social permission to act this way, and therefore can’t be held legally accountable when they behave according to their training. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Ada (#0)
It's precisely at this point that a civilized society takes the law into their own hands rather than sit idly by and witness the ravages of a police state gone rogue and protected by the what once passed for the law and justice. "A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circlue of our felicities. Thomas Jefferson
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