Owing Child Support Can Be Lethal

Submitted by el cid on Wed, 2015-04-08 16:35

Story here. This is another big story about a black man shot by a white cop. The cop now faces murder charges:

"Dramatic video that shows a white South Carolina police officer shooting a fleeing black man after a traffic stop has led authorities to file a murder charge against the officer amid public outrage over a series of deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of law enforcement agents."

So why did the man run?

"Walter Scott Sr. told the NBC "Today Show" that his son may have run because he owed child support and didn't want to go back to jail."

You may not want to watch the video. They say it's brutal.

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Comments

Saw the vid. There was no reason the officer had for firing his weapon. The man was clearly fleeing and unarmed. A SCOTUS decision made last century concluded that firing on a fleeing suspect who is not armed with a lethal weapon is murder. The decision arose from a case where an overweight officer fired on and killed a fleeing juvenile who was not armed and scaling a chain-link fence. The officer's stated reason for doing so was that he didn't think he'd be able to catch the suspect because he didn't think he could scale the fence to catch him due to his weight. Unbelievably, before the decision it had been held lawful for police to fire on fleeing suspects if they did not stop after being warned in a number of states. This decision put that practice to bed.

One of the first things a recruit officer is taught is not to fire on unarmed but fleeing suspects specifically due to this decision and doing so can get you charged with murder *and* sued by the dead suspect's survivors. This is so clear a case of an unlawful shooting tantamount to murder that it ought to be added to all law enforcement academy training curricula.

And I seriously doubt the officer would have shot him if he had been a she, much less white v. black. If anyone can watch this video and say there was neither the suspect's sex nor ethnicity involved in the officer's decision to open fire, I have to wonder if we're seeing the same video.

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Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2015-04-09 13:06

A lot of people don't like going to prison--that's why we have prisons--and will physically resist going to or back to prison. It takes force to put people in prison and keep them there. At this video shows, that force can be lethal.

Some officials seem to believe there we had no good reason for eliminating debtors' prisons--that it's sort of a legal technicality that they should be able to get around for the public good. So they do get around it.

But this video shows why jailing people for debt is a really bad idea. The man is dead because he ran because he didn't want to go back to jail for owing money. They will likely get the cop for murder. But this father is still dead for the crime of owing money. And I get it--he resisted arrest. Or, better said, ran. But he likely would not have run if he was not afraid of going back to jail.

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Submitted by el cid on Thu, 2015-04-09 14:50