Justice, Police

White Cop Promises To Kill Black Man, Kills Black Man, Gets Acquitted

Apparently premeditation is also not something cops can be held accountable for.

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There is no fact pattern available that will allow us to convict a cop for shooting a black person to death.

If we are going to move forward as a non-violent, pluralistic society, we need to reckon with that. We need to understand that the law, as it stands now, is designed to protect cops and not protect us minorities from the cops. We need to understand that the law is willing to suffer the execution of black people — on the streets, at the hands of the state — without due process and legal protections for the rights of black suspects to live. The problem is not any individual racist cop (though they are a problem), the problem is not any individual racist juror or judge (thought they are a problem).

It is legal for cops to murder black people. You literally must accept that reality if you have any hope of changing it in the future. Today in St. Louis, we learned that it’s even legal for cops to premeditate the murder of black suspects.

In 2011, St. Louis cop Jason Stockley shot and killed Anthony Lamar Smith. Stockley shot Smith five times after a “high-speed car chase.” Initially Stockley wasn’t charged, because people didn’t even pretend to think of holding cops accountable for shooting black people in 2011. We were all still “lying,” according to the media and prosecutors back then.

Prosecutors re-opened the case in 2016 when video surfaced of the incident. From Vice News:

In the video, Stockley can be heard saying “we’re killing this motherfucker” after Smith rammed into his police car.

Now, for you or me, if we said “we’re killing this motherf**ker” and then sped off in our automobile to catch up to said “motherf**ker* until we were close enough to shoot him five times, that would be pretty strong evidence of our intent to commit… murder.

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Stockley was charged with murder in the first degree… because that’s what he did. He premeditated killing somebody, then had time to drive around and arguably “cool off” before he killed him.

But Stockley is a cop, and so different rules apply to him. Cops are ALLOWED to kill black people: they’re allowed to kill us for any reason or no reason at all. They are, evidently, allowed to say they’re going to kill us before they kill us.

In this case, St. Louis Circuit Judge Timothy Wilson simply applied that law:

“People say all kinds of things in the heat of the moment or while in stressful situations,” Wilson wrote in his opinion Thursday.

Stockley waived his right to a jury trial. Even though we know juries are more than happy to let cops get away with murder, I suppose there was a chance that Stockley’s premeditation of murder would look like an “admission of guilt” instead of “an accurate reflection of the state of the law.” It took a judge to be sure that the law was not perverted to hold the cop accountable for his actions.

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Again, we already know that it’s okay for cops to openly talk about killing black people. Just a few weeks ago, we all saw a cop in Georgia reassuring a white lady that cops only kill black people. The law has decided that it is okay for cops to talk about this, joke about this, and actually do this.

I don’t know what we do about this, but I know that to do anything we have to recognize where we actually are. People who “protest,” people who “riot,” people like me who can only be bothered to bitch and moan on the internet, we’re all doing it under the assumption that the law somehow prohibits the police from murdering black people. IT DOES NOT.

“Reasonable” use of force, “defense” of self and others, these are concepts that exist ONLY to justify the mass killing of minorities (and any white citizens unlucky enough to get in their way) at the hands of the state. The law has determined that the safety of the cops themselves is MORE IMPORTANT than the safety of the citizens they murder.

If we’re going to change that, we have to change it at its source. This isn’t an issue where we have to “enforce the laws on the books” against police brutality. We need a whole different slate of laws governing police behavior. Until we get serious about doing that, black people are going to continue to die, and their murderers will continue to go free.

Not guilty [Vice News]

Earlier:

Officer Reassures White Lady: ‘We Only Kill Black People’

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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