>>> "Carl Remick" <carlremick at hotmail.com> 02/28/00 12:35PM >>>
>I think there was a long article in the NYT on how the verdict did call
>into question the rules of police conduct. I forgot about its content (the
>points weren't much discussed in the headline story I think), read it this
>morning off the web (the NYT sold out here today early), and it wasn't
>nearly as good as Shapiro's.
Shapiro's key point does get to the heart of this case: "in the Diallo case, there was no sadism, no rage, no coverup. Instead, there was just standard operating procedure."
The Diallo case was homicide *by policy.*
*************** CB: Examination of the precise legal issue, self-defense ( deadly force may be used and there is a defense of self-defense if one is in reasonable fear of great bodily harm or death ) demonstrates the heinousness of the judge's rulings. The judge in the case has to be saying that the cops' racist mentality gives rise to a reasonable fear or that fearing death or great bodily harm from every Black person (man ?) in a Black neighborhood is reasonable. Otherwise, how did the evidence "supporting" self-defense even get into the record ? In effect , the court found that it is ok to sacrifice the rights and lives of the vast majority of the Black men who are innocent ( or worse, are they saying that the majority of the Black men in a Black neighborhood are guilty of something , so its ok anyway to shoot them !!!?) to protect the cops from the tiny, tiny minority of Black men who are a true threat. This is a per se genocidal concept. They are endorsing , calling reasonable, the cops' usi! ng race as a criteria for the decision to use deadly force. Any violence they use is justifiable as self-defense regardless of the fact that the vast majority of Black men are not criminals.
The Diallo case is not the only recent one illustrating this racist disregard of the rights of Black people qua Black people. There was that other upstate New York case where the police went around arresting every Black man in the town because a robbery victim said her attacker was a Black man. By definition, if only one man did it, every other Black man arrested except one, had to be innocent ( that is mathematically exact), but the rights of all those innocents didn't matter. They could be arrested without violating their 4th Amendment rights JUST BECAUSE THEY WERE BLACK. The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld that. That is basically admitting a fascist racist legal rule. Of course there are many other cases. These are fullblown ACLU, civil libertarian, 4th Amendment, search and seizure, probable cause, issues , as well as 14 Amendment issues.
CB