Officer Byrd and Ashli Babbitt
drummerboy said:
I am loathe to link to The Hill, much less Jonathan Turley, but he kind of makes some sense here
You are loath to link to it. You may loathe linking to it but you are not loathe to link to it.
drummerboy said:
I am loathe to link to The Hill, much less Jonathan Turley, but he kind of makes some sense here
This sounded strange to me -- that someone has to be resisting arresting or trying to flee for lethal force to be justified:
While the Supreme Court, in cases such as Graham v. Connor, has said that courts must consider "the facts and circumstances of each particular case," it has emphasized that lethal force must be used only against someone who is "an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and ... is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight."
(The assertion that lethal force "must be used" also sounds wrong but is presumably just careless wording.)
Sure enough, Turley's paraphrase and partial quote mischaracterize what Graham v. Connor says. Below is the full sentence from the ruling. "Attention to," "including" and "whether" all subvert Turley's rendering of it as an "only against someone who" checklist:
Because "[t]he test of reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment is not capable of precise definition or mechanical application," Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U. S. 520, 441 U. S. 559 (1979), however, its proper application requires careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case, including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.
Graham's very next line quotes an earlier ruling to declare that "the question is 'the totality of the circumstances.'"
If Turley is going to put a Supreme Court decision to the lathe, I can skip the rest of his column and feel it's no big loth.
I just knew he must be lying about something.
Well, fool me twice, you don't get fooled again.
Smedley said:
drummerboy said:
I am loathe to link to The Hill, much less Jonathan Turley, but he kind of makes some sense here
You are loath to link to it. You may loathe linking to it but you are not loathe to link to it.
well, I'll be dimmed.
You should have stopped there. He misstates facts and chronologies (a Turley trademark now).