{"id":39056,"date":"2017-06-24T03:00:12","date_gmt":"2017-06-24T07:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=39056"},"modified":"2017-06-27T12:10:18","modified_gmt":"2017-06-27T16:10:18","slug":"the-murder-of-philando-castile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/06\/24\/the-murder-of-philando-castile\/","title":{"rendered":"The murder of Philando Castile"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thomas Knapp<\/a> on what he calls “The Castile Doctrine” … the police being held to far lower standards than ordinary citizens:<\/p>\n

On June 16, a jury acquitted St. Anthony, Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez of all charges in the 2016 killing of motorist Philando Castile. That acquittal was, in a sense, also a death sentence \u2014 not for Yanez, but for future motorists unfortunate enough to encounter cops like him.<\/p>\n

No, this is not a \u201cbad cop\u201d story. It\u2019s a sad tale and I actually feel sorry for Yanez. But the facts are what they are.<\/p>\n

Yanez killed Castile. The killing was caught on video and neither Yanez nor his attorneys denied it.<\/p>\n

His defense (that he feared for his life) was based on ridiculous grounds relating to the smell of cannabis and the presence of a child (\u201cI thought, I was gonna die, and I thought if he\u2019s, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five year old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing, then what, what care does he give about me?\u201d).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I find his justification to be astonishing … how can a man who thinks like this have ever been trusted with a gun and a badge?<\/p>\n

Castile had informed Yanez that he possessed a concealed weapon and a permit for it, and was following Yanez\u2019s orders to produce the permit when Yanez panicked and fired.<\/p>\n

Key word: Panicked. His fear wasn\u2019t justified. It wasn\u2019t reasonable. It was unthinking and irrational. That made him culpably negligent in the killing.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The jury, in relieving him of the consequences of that failure, continued a sad tradition of holding law enforcement officers to a lesser standard of conduct than ordinary Americans. In doing so, they made the world a safer place for cops who shouldn\u2019t be cops \u2014 and a more dangerous place for the rest of us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

US law generally holds civilian gun owners to much higher standards in cases like this than they ever seem to expect their own law enforcement officers to meet. A civilian who shot a driver in a similar situation would be lucky to only be facing manslaughter charges, but might well be convicted of first degree murder. A cop? Every<\/em> extenuating circumstance is given full weight by both judge and jury. A person with no formal training is expected (and required) to be cool, calm, and collected under unexpected extreme stress, while a trained officer is given a pass for “panic” and irresponsible gunplay. Where’s the justice?<\/p>\n

Update, 27 June<\/strong>: Even more puzzling is the virtual silence of the National Rifle Association (NRA)<\/a> over this judicial killing:<\/p>\n

These are gruesomely interesting times in the American gun debate. The footage of Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez killing motorist Philando Castile wasn\u2019t enough to convict him in a court of law, but it\u2019s no less damning for that. The more these videos pile up, the harder it gets to rationalize American police forces\u2019 objectively insane collective death count.<\/p>\n

The circumstances of Castile\u2019s death are particularly enraging for gun rights activists \u2014 or, rather, they ought to be. Castile calmly informed Yanez he was legally armed, just as he should have; Yanez freaked out and, seconds later, pumped seven bullets into the car. By rights, many have observed, the NRA should be leading marches through the Twin Cities. Instead it\u2019s saying and doing bugger all. Not a good look.<\/p>\n

On the other side of the great divide, the gun control movement is almost in hibernation \u2014 and understandably so. Theirs is a tough climb at the best of times; with a Republican House and Senate it\u2019s a sheer cliff.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Knapp on what he calls “The Castile Doctrine” … the police being held to far lower standards than ordinary citizens: On June 16, a jury acquitted St. Anthony, Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez of all charges in the 2016 killing of motorist Philando Castile. That acquittal was, in a sense, also a death sentence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,13],"tags":[343,49,267,489,98],"class_list":["post-39056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-usa","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-guns","tag-justice","tag-minnesota","tag-police"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a9W","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39056"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39113,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39056\/revisions\/39113"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}