This is a difficult one. A police officer responded to a call about open doors at a home. As he was searching the home's parameter, he saw a woman through the window holding a gun, and she seemed to kind of being holding the gun toward him, although probably he could not really get a good view. The police officer immediately shot her, which resulted in the woman's death. Other police who arrived found the woman holding a gun where she was killed. The officer is now being charged with murder. Officials say that the woman was within her rights to protect herself and her nephew when she heard noises in her backyard and went to the window to investigate. Former officer Aaron Dean takes the stand in Atatiana Jefferson case - ABC News (go.com) Aaron Dean 2019 fatal shooting of Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth Was he right to shoot? Should he be punished for murder? What do you think? The case is made more complicated by the fact that he was white police officer and she was a black woman.
Things like this discourage folks from wanting to become cops. The fewer cops, the more crime. Where will it end?
Did he announce himself? He was stepping on someone else's property, to investigate a door being open which is not a crime or per se evidence of same. He is outside the exigent circumstances exception. He could not really get a good view, and tagged the homeowner stone dead. I call that murder, because that's what you or I would get in the same circumstance. The only reason anyone wants to excuse him is thin blue line bullshit.
Keep in mind he did not really explicitly say he could not get a clear view, but I think that can probably be implied by the circumstances. The question is does he get the benefit of the doubt. Should we assume that he clearly saw the woman pointing the gun at him. It cannot be proved one way or the other, and the only information we have about that detail is his testimony. The next question, if you believe it is murder, is what the punishment should be. Should it be punished just like an ordinary murder, or should he get far less time in prison, due to the circumstances? For example, maybe only 5 years in prison, or only 10. It's a dangerous job being a police officer if you are investigating what might be a crime scene, you see someone coming up to the window holding a gun, they look like they might be trying to point it at you but it's dark and you cannot get the clearest view, and you are not allowed to try to shoot them first before they can shoot you. He may have been out in the open and there was no place to immediately take cover behind quickly enough. There's also the racial element. The fact that he had one second to see that the person in the window appeared to be black may have affected his decision-making. Remember, he might have only had one or two seconds to make the decision. He might have assumed that there was a higher chance that person in the window was going to shoot him because they were black, which is statistically not untrue. He probably was not able to make out their gender or realize that it was a woman. The woman was 28 years old. Of course if race was an element in the decision to shoot her, many people will want to punish him for that. Keep in mind he was wearing a police uniform, and in recent times there have been several targeted shootings of police in the news. So the fact that he was wearing a uniform did put him in some more danger.
He's admitted on the stand he didn't have a very clear view. Well let's examine it: He's the intruder on someone else's homestead. He's answering a welfare check, that doesn't allow him to use the exigent circumstances exception. He's not heard a blood curdling scream or a gunshot or something. He's had a call out that a karen is nervous. He doesn't announce his presence. That means he's outside of what he's supposed to be doing. He's supposed to announce. He has no right to enter a dwelling or case a place just because a door is open and a karen called. She as the homeowner had every right to point a gun at him. He as the intruder did not have a right to shoot her for that.
from the article Officer Carol Darch, Dean's partner at the time, said messiness inside the home made it look like there had been a home invasion of some sort, "like someone had methodically gone through that house looking for something." She said she and Dean didn't announce themselves because of their own safety, as well as based on "open structure" procedure that trains officers to reduce the possibility that they might give an intruder into the home a chance to escape by alerting them of their presence.
Except he shot her from outside, so they had none of that knowledge. They were answering a karen's call out, not the homeowner's, just an open door nothing else, and had no reason to be able to use that exigent circumstances exception. They should've announced. If they were worried about a guy coming out the back, one should take the back the other the front and they should both announce.
