Video complicates cop-shooting case
Experts: Footage means difficult case for defense lawyers
Experts: Defense to be hard. Also: Dash-cam details.
Unlike other videos in the last year that have shown a law officer shooting an unarmed suspect, the shaky smartphone footage that went viral this week leaves little to the imagination.
And that, legal experts say, will leave attorneys for Michael Slager to build their defense on what happened before a bystander pushed the “on” button, capturing the 33-year-old North Charleston, S.C., police officer firing eight times at the back of a fleeing man.
Shortly after the video emerged Tuesday, authorities charged Slager with murder. Although hundreds of fatal shootings involving law enforcement officers occur each year, few criminal charges are filed, and murder charges are rare.
Prosecuting such cases is typically an uphill battle because of how much leeway the law gives officers in the line of duty. But veteran lawyers and legal experts say this video’s depiction of the shooting of Walter Scott will make the job of the officer’s attorneys much harder.
“You’ve got a very extreme case,” said Franklin Zimring, a University of California at Berkeley law professor who is writing a book on police shootings. “There are 500 killings by police in the U.S. each year. How many of them are realistic candidates for the criminal conviction of officers? They would be on the fingers of one hand. ... This may very well be the one.”
Particularly damning for the officer is the legal standard under the 1985 U.S. Supreme Court decision Tennessee v. Garner, which established it is unconstitutional to use deadly force against nondangerous fleeing suspects only to prevent them from getting away.
Because the video appears to tell the story of the shooting so clearly, experts said defense attorneys for the officer would focus on the seconds before what the footage captures and the officer’s state of mind.
“What other things did the video not capture?” said defense attorney Michael Schwartz, who successfully defended a Fullerton, Calif., police officer charged with involuntary manslaughter and excessive force in the 2011 beating death of a mentally ill man.
Schwartz said the law deferred to officers’ judgment if they’re acting in self-defense or in the defense of others.
Ed Obayashi, an attorney and sheriff’s deputy in California who is a use-of-force expert, said defense attorneys could try to make an issue out of how quickly prosecutors decided to file murder charges.
“In the wake of Ferguson and other incidents, some may see this as a rush to judgment by the government,” he said, referring to the fatal shooting last summer of an unarmed black man by a white police officer and the subsequent unrest in Ferguson, Mo..
Criminal convictions of officers in shootings are rare across the U.S. An Ohio professor who reviewed nationwide shooting cases between 2005 and 2011 found 28 instances of murder or non-negligent manslaughter charges filed against officers during the period, of which fewer than half resulted in convictions.
In the same period, FBI statistics said there were more than 2,700 cases of “justifiable homicide” by law enforcement officers.
Experts say the South Carolina video may make this case different. The hardest part of what’s shown in the video for Slager’s attorneys to argue away before a jury, experts said, would be the number of shots fired, and what appears to be evidence tampering by the officer after Scott is gunned down.
Slager said in initial statements, and over the police radio, that Scott wrestled with him for his Taser; the video appears to show the officer dropping an object next to Scott’s prone body.