Death Row for Self Defence - Jonathan Pryor's web log

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Death Row for Self Defence

From Instapundit, the problem with no-knock police raids.

Short version: Police get a warrant for a no-knock police raid, raid a duplex, and enter the side of the duplex the don't have a warrant for (as they didn't know it was a duplex to begin with). The police either don't knock or don't provide sufficient reaction time from the inhabitants, enter, and one of the officers gets shot and later dies.

Perfectly understandable, actually -- you get woken up in the middle of the night, have people shooting at you, so you defend yourself and your family with the weapons available to you.

What isn't understandable is where it goes from there. The shooter was black, the officer white (and the son of the police chief), and the jury was white. The shooter was sent to death row.

What's deeply troubling is jury statements, in which they convicted because they didn't like the attorney's closing statement.

TheAgitator.com has more.

Overall, this could be used as a reason to prohibit the death penalty -- innocent people have been convicted and will be needlessly killed.

Posted on 12 Dec 2005 | Path: /wtf/ | Permalink