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blarzgh posted:It would already fall under the destruction of evidence, or 'spoliation' protections. I think you go one step further, and make it strict liability. As in, "If the Court doesn't have your body cam video within 30 days of the filing of suit/complaint..." If you don't have it, we don't care why you don't have it, thats on you. An adverse evidentiary inference given to the jury by the judge is already a lot. Having the judge turn to the jury and say "because they lost this piece of evidence, I am instructing you to assume that it was unfavorable to their case" is basically the judge instructing the jury to use their imagination to figure out what the worst thing it could have been was. Make it a non-discretionary instruction (hell, write prescribed text to use) and that solves most of the problem.
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Jun 5, 2015 22:35
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ActusRhesus posted:You don't get to appeal an acquittal. You do get to appeal improper jury instructions and incorrect evidentiary rulings. Failure to give a non-discretionary instruction should qualify.
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Jun 6, 2015 00:30
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ActusRhesus posted:No. The defendant gets to appeal bad instructions. If the instruction results in an acquittal tough poo poo. Same with evidentiary rulings. There are limited circumstances where the state can halt the trial to take an interlocutory appeal but once a NG verdict is in it's game over for the state. The state can appeal an appellate court ruling though. Yes, I was talking about an interlocutory appeal (which is why I mentioned the kinds of things that interlocutory appeals are used for...). That kind of failure is absolutely tailor-made for an interlocutory appeal - limited issue, basically dead-simple decision because it is quite literally "is there footage? No? Did they give the instruction? No? Order the instruction given." That said, I somewhat doubt you'd see a lot of failures to give the instruction in a non-discretionary environment, and the instruction would presumably also apply in any follow-on civil cases so it would have some value there as well.
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Jun 6, 2015 01:29
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Jarmak posted:Okay yeah, but I don't think its fair to assume that people would assume you're talking about an interlocutory appeal, or even know what that is, when you post in this thread. It is 100% fair to assume AR would, and also quite fair to assume anyone who would bring up the general limitation on criminal appeals by prosecution would, though. In other words, anyone who was going to take issue with it on that account should also have understood why it isn't actually an issue.
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Jun 6, 2015 01:35
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Dazzling Addar posted:i'm going to offer the controversial opinion that tasing is not the proper response to a young person attempting to exercise their quickly eroding consitutional rights You don't have a right not to show your license when pulled over.
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Jun 18, 2015 03:51
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VitalSigns posted:And the penalty is death, no trial. Yes, that's totally the natural implication of my correcting someone regarding their mistaken impression that the guy has a right not to show id when stopped while driving.
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Jun 18, 2015 03:55
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VitalSigns posted:That kid didn't even show his license: he was no angel. See, this is exercising a constitutional right - the right to free (even when moronic) speech. Refusing to show a cop your driver's license, on the other hand, is not exercising a constitutional right, and people who aren't you should be aware of that so they don't get unjustifiably shot when they get stopped.
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Jun 18, 2015 04:10
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Dazzling Addar posted:I know that he was actually under some asinine legal obligation. That's not the point. The response to a 17 year old making a mistake about the arcana of the 4th amendment is not tasing them. Kneejerk legalism is really unbecoming. The response to someone else posting that he had a constitutional right to do so is to correct them so that they themselves don't try the same thing and get themselves tased or worse. I mean, it's so arcane that it's right up front when the ACLU explains what rights people have. VitalSigns posted:People are going to sass cops sometimes, that's just going to happen. Shrugging and saying "well, no one would die if everyone just doesn't make a mistake ever" is just asinine apologetics for a dangerous and broken system. That's not what I said. In response to someone saying "its totally okay to point the plane at the ground and push the throttle!" After a news story about someone doing exactly that, I pointed out that it is, in fact, not okay. (It's a bad analogy, though.) As nm said, I can disagree with what both the cop and the kid did. Even with my 'joke' about wishing you would, I would rather not hear about people getting shot for making a dumb mistake. One way to do that is to correct people who are under the incorrect impression that they have a right to do so, and hope that they will similarly educate others. Kalman fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Jun 18, 2015 |
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Jun 18, 2015 04:23
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VitalSigns posted:It's a good thing this dangerous child was stopped permanently before he got in front of some liberal judge who might let him out to sass another cop. I highly recommend you go do the same thing. I mean, it's your constitutional right, right?
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Jun 18, 2015 04:38
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VitalSigns posted:This goes back to my point that you don't want to address: that a system which deals out death for minor and common human foibles is a dangerous and irresponsible one. I don't disagree with you on that point. Does it make you happier if i say (again) that the cop shouldn't have shot him? But since you clearly agree with me that what he did wasn't his constitutional right, I'm sure you're happy to admit that one way to make sure that people don't repeat his mistake is to educate them about what their rights actually are.
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Jun 18, 2015 04:42
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Dazzling Addar posted:I want it to be clear that I don't think that the driver should not have faced any legal repercussions for driving without a license. However, the point that I am so desperately trying to make is that when a 17 year old breaks the law in a fairly minor way (he was certainly not murdering his wife in cold blood, for instance), tasers should not even come into the equation. It's not like the officer had some sort of sixth sense informing him that the driver did not actually have a license. He started the confrontation for petty reasons and escalated it to a lethal shooting. I don't think anyone thinks it was an acceptable outcome. VitalSigns posted:You can't "make sure" people don't repeat his mistake, you can make it less likely (although just telling a few people on a forum not to sass cops isn't exactly widely effective), but unless you make people into not-people, that mistake is going to happen, and our system should be robust enough to deal with that. That's, uh, not even close to what happened. Did you actually watch the video?
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Jun 18, 2015 04:58
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VitalSigns posted:I'm talking about what happened before the video even took place: rather than responding to people flashing the cop in a reasonable way "oh geez, I must be blinding people, that's dangerous" he decides to nuisance ticket them for alerting him. The kid even said in the video "your lights were so bright I couldn't see". This officer was more interested in preserving his sense of authority than in public safety from the beginning, and that's a serious problem with policing in America. He didn't ticket any of the drivers he pulled over, and the kid was the one who escalated the situation to the point where the taser coming out was actually a pretty reasonable response. HTH.
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Jun 18, 2015 05:07
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SedanChair posted:Just comply. Compliance is normalcy, citizen. Comply, and challenge it later. That's what every civil rights organization in the U.S. tells you to do.
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Jun 19, 2015 04:18
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SedanChair posted:Comply! Comply or be neutralized. You can simultaneously think that you should comply with police officers, even if they're in the wrong, and also not think that non-compliance deserves you being shot. I mean, if you're not a literal crazy person, you can.
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Jun 19, 2015 05:04
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VitalSigns posted:Of course, the actual suggestion--that cops should have partners and backup available, and that if they're alone with an unarmed suspect who isn't an imminent public threat they should call for backup rather than getting into a dangerous and potentially lethal physical confrontation Did you miss the part where the officer did exactly that? He called for backup as soon as it went from being a routine traffic stop to something where he might have to arrest someone.
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Jun 19, 2015 19:55
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SurgicalOntologist posted:This is perhaps the least important of all the incorrect and misleading claims you've been making, but since this is an area I have expertise in I felt like correcting you. At the risk of another pointless derail. How dare you correct someone about a mistaken impression they have in an area that you know more than they do.
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Jun 19, 2015 20:11
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SurgicalOntologist posted:Yes, exactly. Making up some sciency sounding fact out of thin air is just part of the post-hoc justification game. Which is why I thought it worthwhile to correct. Right. Making up some legalese after the fact is just part of the post-hoc asserting the driver was completely in the right game. That's why I felt it was worthwhile to correct.
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Jun 19, 2015 20:24
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ElCondemn posted:So are you cool with me coming to where you are and doing what the officer did to that kid? You didn't say no. Asking me to show you my license? I mean, I guess so. It's kind of a weird fetish though. Can I be super abrasive and refuse after you're already here?
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Jun 19, 2015 20:35
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So they should have what, walked away so that someone else could handle the call? I'm sure that he wouldn't have shot his wife if they'd done that. Christ. You can empathize with someone and still think they made the wrong decision. (At least if you're actually a loving human being.)
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Jun 27, 2015 04:05
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Anora posted:Do you not get that it's their job to make tough calls like that? What if the murderer cop had a bomb, or was walking down the street shooting at random people? Should they let him do that stuff too, because he's their friend? What if they thought the murderer had a gun pointed at them and they were actually wrong? I thought shooting the person in that situation was wrong, according to this thread.
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Jun 28, 2015 16:06
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Neurolimal posted:I'm imagining the shooter sitting on the car hood sobbing, the wife wheezing through multiple wounds as the life pours from her body, while four feet away the police officers have organized a team to pick out the most in-focus shots of his kids, and a team to design the floral patterns to frame them. You know that they just tossed him a phone with his facebook pulled up, right?
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Jun 29, 2015 00:23
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Anora posted:And sorry I have a level of disconnect that says "oh poo poo, my bro is popping a cap in his wife, and I'm covered in body armor with a variety of tools to stop him that may not result in his death, I should stop him," and then have the ability to make that call within 30 minutes. You've never heard of the trolley experiment, apparently. It is a lot easier for people to choose to let someone die by inaction rather than to kill someone by action. It doesn't make it right, but it makes it understandable.
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Jun 29, 2015 13:06
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It's almost like people can think that shooting someone because you thought they had a gun and not shooting someone because you know them and think that you can talk them down are both understandable decisions and that there should be some empathy for the person who made that decision given the situation they made it in, but can also think that neither was actually the right decision to have made. I can accept that shooting, or not shooting, in those situations was a reasonable choice even while at the same time not thinking it was the best choice.
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Jun 29, 2015 22:21
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ActusRhesus posted:stop thinking like a lawyer. Not everyone ITT has 200K to throw at law school. I don't know. Most of this thread seems to think like they graduated from Cooley.
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Jun 29, 2015 23:05
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ElCondemn posted:Right, you believe it's acceptable for police to shoot unarmed people because police fear their safety, you also think it's reasonable to not intervene with lethal force against an armed active threat. That is the problem, you guys think it's reasonable to do things that are terrible. You have no empathy for the victims, and you act like this is normal. I have lots of empathy for the victim, I'm just not a sociopath who has zero empathy for the wrongdoer. You can empathize with both.
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Jun 29, 2015 23:16
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SedanChair posted:No, that's not reasonable. You turn murderers off when they are in the act of committing murder. If police have trouble with it, they should practice at poker games, with Simunitions. "Pop quiz I'm a murderer! Turn me off bro! I'd do the same for you." So you support training police to be less moral, less human, and more willing to overcome natural inhibitions against use of force?
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Jun 30, 2015 14:48
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VitalSigns posted:Yes actually I do think policing should be done by a professional "force" of some kind, maybe even one with some sort of academy where they could be trained to cope with the human urge to protect their own tribe at all costs and to be frightened of those who look like they are from another tribe, so they can discharge the duties appropriate to their career in a civilized society. Hey, me too. So you agree with me that it's totally natural for the officers not to have wanted to shoot their sergeant. See? You can think that what they did was totally normal and human and still the wrong choice. Which is what people have been trying to get through your thick loving skull for the last 5 pages.
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Jun 30, 2015 15:22
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Lemming posted:So again, if the victim had died of being punched in the head, would the result have still been the same as long as the cops still agreed not to tattle on each other? If the prosecutor couldn't find some other way to authenticate the evidence, then yes.
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Jul 8, 2015 17:27
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Lemming posted:My issue with this case is that it seems absurd that you can't authenticate a video taken from inside a police car. It seems like a system that's deliberately setup so if it helps a cop they say "yeah the video was right" and if it implicates them they say "I remember it differently" and that's somehow an iron clad defense. It isn't an ironclad defense but you need a person (human being) to say "yes, this video is an accurate representation of events and here is how I know." It's a basic rule of evidence - evidence has to be authenticated by testimony. It isn't always testimony based on personal knowledge - there are typically ways to authenticate a document based on standard business practices. But you still need some witness to sponsor the document. It sounds like they couldn't get one.
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Jul 8, 2015 18:04
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Lemming posted:So they can't get a technician to say "yeah, this video is of the events that occurred at the time stamp indicated, and it was taken from the car the teenager was arrested in"? The standards are literally that you need a person who can lie or misremember to say "this objective video is correct, maybe I think"? This seems absurd. No, that would probably be fine, if such a technician existed. Like I said, testimony to authenticate doesn't necessarily require personal knowledge. quote:What kind of insane asylum do I live in that it's reasonable to not use the video when both cops agree that yeah, we were there and one of us hit him in the face, but the video is wrong because I'm going to lie about what happened, and everyone's like "yep seems fine." The kind that insists that a human being, who can be cross-examined, has to be willing to say that the video is an accurate representation of what it depicts so that we can avoid unrebuttable falsified evidence being introduced. I get that you dislike the result here, but we have rules about evidence to protect defendants. Sacrificing those rules to get a single cop is a bad idea.
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Jul 8, 2015 18:45
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Trabisnikof posted:This is one of those situations where if this was about a non-cop, we'd find someone else to authenticate the video, but since this is a cop, strangely that effort is never made. That person might not exist. Given that they used immunity to attempt to force testimony, it's not really a safe assumption that they were trying to avoid prosecuting the cop. Lemming posted:I'm neither a lawyer nor a cop so I don't know enough to make any reasonably informed suggestions, but my personal, uninformed, short-sighted, idiot suggestion would be that I'd imagine the cops shouldn't be the only ones with the ability to validate those sort of videos. If you were a lawyer you would have understood the first two times I told you that cops aren't the only ones with the ability to validate videos.
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Jul 8, 2015 18:59
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Lemming posted:I believed you, which is why the implicit assumption I was working on was that there was such a person in the police department who could have done that but didn't because they're on the cop's team, which is why I suggested a third party watch dog technician so hopefully they'd be free of that influence. I'm assuming that the prosecution didn't have access to such a person or they would have gone with that. If that person existed, the prosecutor almost certainly would have subpoenad them to compel testimony rather than giving immunity to someone else to try to compel their testimony, which is what they wound up doing. That's why I say things like "that person probably doesn't exist," not "that person was under the influence of police."
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Jul 8, 2015 19:06
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ozmunkeh posted:One wonders how the video even came into being, let alone how it magicked itself out of the recording device and into a playable format on a lawyer's desk. Too bad we'll never find out what manner of sorcery enabled its creation. Well, see, that is exactly what you need a witness to testify to in order for it to be admissible.
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Jul 8, 2015 21:31
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Trabisnikof posted:If a CCTV camera sees a criminal breaking into a store at night, do we need the criminal to agree that the film is valid before the film before it can be evidence? No. quote:So is the issue that they couldn't get a witness to admit to who took the tape out of the machine? (also how is that not a custody issue?) How could that not be solved by having someone other than the officer be responsible for removing said tape? Yes, possibly, and it could potentially be solved in that way.
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Jul 8, 2015 21:57
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:So how about that previous question. If an officer is alone but has a bodycam recording and murders someone, the bodycam is effectively inadmissable absent another witness? The officer could literally be caught with a smoking gun standing over a dead body, and you're saying the appropriate legal response is just to shrug your shoulders? No, that's not what she's saying. It's inadmissible absent a sponsoring witness who can testify to the reasons the recording should be trusted. You don't necessarily need an independent witness to the events the video records.
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Jul 8, 2015 23:47
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Trabisnikof posted:What does it take to determine a recording made by police should be trusted? The exact same thing in either case: a human being who can testify that the thing is what it is being claimed to be.
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Jul 9, 2015 00:14
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Lemming posted:If that video is legitimately useless as evidence then all evidence that exists is useless because that's the most clear cut obvious poo poo that we've seen in the thread, beyond maybe Walter Scott getting shot in the back. Hi. Moron. The problem was not the video being useless as evidence. The problem is that there was apparently no one who could prove the video was what it was claimed to be, which made it useless. The exact same video plus a testifying evidence technician saying "yes this is how we normally record dash cam video and the characteristics of this video are consistent with it being from that officers dash cam at that time" would have been great and admissible evidence.
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Jul 9, 2015 01:09
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DARPA posted:and that wasn't possible in this case because...? I have no idea! That person might not have existed. That person for that police department might be the cop and/or his partner, which is an obvious flaw. It seems unlikely the prosecutor wouldn't have attempted to find that person, since they went to the trouble of getting immunity for the partner to try to force him to testify, so the safer bet is that they don't exist. They should exist. But the takeaway from that case should not be "let's remove basic procedural protections that are mandated by the constitution for criminal defendants so we can prosecute a cop." Lemming posted:Yes, I understand how it works, since you explained it earlier. Since they were not able to get anyone to validate it, in this case, it was useless as evidence. The obviously bullshit part is that they were unable to get someone to validate it. Yeah. If you can't authenticate evidence it isn't useful. That is very different from "that's the most clear cut obvious poo poo and all evidence is useless if it can't be used", your original statement.
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Jul 9, 2015 01:19
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jfood posted:Regardless of methodology for authentication, if you follow your thought it's some sort of oppression charge. It's routine police work, being obstructed in an organized manner to deprive a citizen of their civil liberties. And you say this because... What, you assume the STL police are competent and well organized? I mean, have you actually read this thread?
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Jul 9, 2015 01:25
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Devor posted:http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/crm/242fin.php No, just the hypothetical ones that attempt to remove police officer's Confrontation Clause rights by changing the evidentiary standard only for them. Those are pretty unconstitutional.
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Jul 9, 2015 14:01
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