Yesterday, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of all charges, including second-degree manslaughter, in the shooting of Philando Castile. Mark Berman of The Washington Post reports:
The Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop was acquitted on all charges by a jury Friday, a decision that came nearly a year after the encounter was partially streamed online to a rapt nation in the midst of a painful reckoning over shootings by law enforcement.
Officer Jeronimo Yanez pulled Castile’s car over in Falcon Heights, a suburb near Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the officer later said he thought Castile matched the description of a suspect in a robbery. The stop quickly escalated.
Yanez fired into the car, saying later he thought Castile was going for his gun, a claim Castile’s girlfriend, sitting in the seat next to him, disputed. She began streaming the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook Live.
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During the trial, jurors heard testimony from dozens of witnesses, including Yanez, who cried on the stand while saying he did not want to shoot Castile. Yanez testified that he thought his life was in danger at the time, and attorneys for Yanez have argued that Castile caused his own death because of his actions during the traffic stop.
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Yanez approached the car window and asked Castile for his license and proof of insurance, which the driver handed over, the complaint states. Castile also told Yanez he had a firearm on him, and seconds later, the officer told the driver not to pull out the gun. Castile said he was not taking out the gun, which Reynolds echoed. Yanez screamed, “Don’t pull it out” and pulled his own gun out, firing seven shots at Castile, the complaint states.
…When Yanez spoke to state investigators a day after the shooting, he told them he was “in fear for my life and my partner’s life.” Yanez told them that he thought Castile was reaching for the gun.
“I thought I was gonna die,” he told investigators, according to the complaint.
Given the salient role that Mr. Yanez’s fear has played in the trial, it is important to keep in mind the words of Ramsey County Attorney John Choi when he decided to charge Mr. Yanez
When evaluating the reasonableness of a police officer's use of deadly force, we must take into account that police officers are often required to react quickly—in tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving situations. To justify the use of deadly force, it is not enough, however, for the police officer to merely express a subjective fear of death or great bodily harm. Unreasonable fear cannot justify the use of deadly force. The use of deadly force must be objectively reasonable and necessary, given the totality of the circumstances.Based upon our thorough and exhaustive review of the facts of this case, it is my conclusion that the use of deadly force by Officer Yanez was not justified and that sufficient facts exist to prove this to be true. Accordingly, we filed a criminal complaint this morning in Ramsey County District Court charging Officer Yanez with Second Degree Manslaughter in the death of Philando Castile and two felony counts of Dangerous Discharge of a Firearm that endangered the safety of Diamond Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter, the two passengers in the car.
I fear that the jury’s findings only corroborate that the American people do not mind that their police frequently act lawlessly. Moreover, I fear that the American people do not mind, even more, that their police frequently act even more lawlessly to the black community in their nation.
Tom Kelly, who represented Mr. Yanez in court, has defended the killing, arguing: “This incident had nothing to do with race. It had everything to do with the presence of a gun. Race did not play a part in the use of deadly force at all. It was the presence of a gun.”
However, the presence of a gun alone should not be considered a just reason for violence, for if it were the police would have a just reason for shooting at a large fraction of the Americans they interact with. In Washington DC v. Heller, the Supreme Court has upheld that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms entirely unconnected with service in a militia. As a result of the Second Amendment, American police must frequently interact with people who lawfully carry firearms.
If Attorney Kelly is right that Mr. Yanez’s actions were just because there was a gun present, then no American who lawfully owns and carries a firearm would be safe interacting with the police. The law, which is supposed to guarantee domestic tranquility and the blessings of liberty among other things, would therefore no longer be doing anything of the sort. Law-abiding Americans would no longer be protected by their law and their interactions with the police are made just that more anarchic.
In this case, Mr. Yanez is ultimately more than a private citizen. Instead, he is an agent of the state and a member of the police-force in a nation in which the police have frequently chosen to defend their own interests above the general welfare. The shooting of a black man only puts these roles in greater clarity.
The problems are then much wider in scope than Mr. Yanez himself. These problems highlight that there is a structural problem with the police, including the heinous war on drugs, that have frankly given them the power to oppress the black community. Given Attorney Kelly’s defense of Mr. Yanez’s actions, blacks can no longer be confident that they even have Second-Amendment rights.
To me, the jury's decision is clear: The police have a license to kill in this country. That affects blacks much, much more than it does whites. For durable progress to be made on race in this nation, we, the people, need to rescind that license to kill. The police must be made accountable to those that they are said to serve, and right now, they have given American blacks every reason to believe their interests ultimately conflict.
What to do, you ask? The first thing that should be done is to immediately end the war on drugs, which disproportionately harms the black community and which has given the police so many opportunities to exercise unlawful power over the black community.
Addendum:
David French, of The National Review, has commented on the case in "The Philando Castile verdict was a miscarriage of justice":
In recent months we’ve seen a number of cases where courts have excused police for shooting citizens even after the police made mistakes — and the citizens were doing nothing wrong — simply because these citizens were exercising their Second Amendment rights. This is unacceptable, and it represents the most extreme possible deprivation of civil rights and civil liberties.
I understand the inherent danger of police work. I also understand the legal responsibilities of men and women who volunteer to put on that uniform, and the legal rights of the citizens they’ve sworn to protect and serve. I’m aware of no evidence that Yanez panicked because Castile was black. But whether he panicked because of race, simply because of the gun, or because of both, he still panicked, and he should have been held accountable. The jury’s verdict was a miscarriage of justice.
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