Quote:
Originally Posted by molson
It might still be relevant/admissible if it were being offered for a permissible purpose relating to the initial confrontation at the car. But yes, it certainly wouldn't be as helpful for the defense if there was solid evidence that there was a significant time, distance, and circumstance separation between whatever happened at the car and whatever happened further away. In fact, it'd be a shitty defense. Which is maybe all you're saying. But defendants are still allowed to put on shitty defenses if the evidence is admissible.
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*and if the key witness for the prosecution is dead
What the people on the pro-cop side don't realize is that everyone else is granting all of these assumptions about what might have happened up to the moment that Michael Brown is a significant distance away from Darren Wilson after getting into a physical confrontation and then trying to make a run for it.
This is the point at which claims of racism come in. Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown and now gets to hide behind the continuum of lawful force, and that calculus in marginal cases is clearly subject to implicit (suspect is black = scary and life-threatening) biases. As has been generally agreed upon in this thread, police officers come from the regular pool of citizens and do not have the same kind of training when compared to US soldiers, so why would they not exhibit the same biases that are clearly seen in studies of the general population?
Nobody is saying that every cop is Bull Connor, but individuals who are granted a legal monopoly on lethal force and billions of dollars' worth of military toys each year need to be held to a much, much higher standard.