by
alandp
on Sat 02 Sep 2006 12:07 PM CDT
From the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Part of the difficulty in finding anyone to charge is because, initially, the crowd that restrained Dornay might have been justified in doing so, Satterberg said.
"The people who initially arrived on the scene had a limited right to use force in defense of Miss Dias," Satterberg said. "At some magic moment, they go from a justifiable use of force in defense of others to unnecessary force that becomes a criminal assault."
At first I wasn't going to put this in "the only ones" category, but after writing this up and re-reading the article, especially the guild's statement, I decided it should go there.
This at first attracted my attention because I think it must be a very unusual finding in which no charges were filed against anyone.
What allegedly happened was, an off-duty cop was trying to walk his motorcycle through a crowd. A woman tried to stop him by straddling the front wheel of his bike. He couldn't get her to move, so he simply started driving, and may have used more force than necessary to dislodge her. The crowd (some of her friends) at first used a justifiable level of force to protect her from the bike rider, but after they knocked him to the ground they continued to attack him. He shot one of them in defense, wounding but not killing the guy.
Maybe this should go into "the only ones" category after all. If the bike rider had not been an off-duty cop, would he have gotten off so easily for shooting someone in Seattle? Maybe someone who knows more about Washington could comment on this.
The Police Officer's Guild is pretty clear on their opinion:
"The community cannot tolerate this type of violence against anyone,
and especially against a law enforcement officer," the guild's
statement read.
Why
especially? What makes him so special?
Especially since he wasn't on duty, and was not acting in any way to enforce the law or protect a civilian when it all started. He was just throwing some drunk, obstinate woman off his bike.
From my reading of the article, it sounds like he was justified in using his firearm.
It sounds like there was plenty of fault to go around, but it strikes me as quite unusual for an incident like this to result in no one being charged with any crime.
So this one goes into the my "self defense" category, and into "the only ones" because of the haughty attitude of the guild.
