Radley Balko reports with some astonishment that a grand jury in Burleson County, Texas has refused to indict a man who shot and killed a police officer who was conducting a SWAT-style raid on his home:
Last December 19th, nine of the 10 members of the Burleson County Sheriff’s Department staged a raid on the rural home of Henry Magee. […]
By the time the raid was over, Deputy Adam Sowder was dead. Magee shot him as Sowder and his fellow deputies attempted to force their way into Magee’s home. Magee was arrested and charged with capital murder — the knowing and intentional killing of a police officer.
[…]
Earlier this month, District Attorney Julie Renken presented the case against Magee to a grand jury. “I made a very thorough presentation on Texas law on cap murder and Texas self defense law,” Renken told me in a phone interview. “There were over three hours of testimony. I did not make a recommendation either way. I just wanted to present the law and evidence very fairly.”
Remarkably, this week the grand jury returned a “no-bill” on the murder charge. That is, they found that Henry Magee had acted in self-defense.
As Radley notes, this is a remarkable ruling:
“I don’t know of any other case where someone shot and killed a police officer in the course of a drug raid has been no-billed by a grand jury,” [Magee’s defense lawyer Dick] DeGuerrin says. “At least in Texas.” Over the course of about eight years of covering these raids, I don’t know of one outside of Texas either.
Scott Greenfield notes how remarkable it is, but he’s worried that the wrong people will get the wrong message:
Yet, this scares me to the core. How many fans of the John Bad Elk decision, incapable of grasping that it is not good law, have been chomping at the bit for a “no bill” like this? There will be armed men and women in tin foil hats with their fingers tightly grasping their weapons praying for someone to walk through that front door so they can put them down.
To the nutjobs, this story proves what they have been thinking, saying, all along. This proves they have the right to kill cops. This proves they can defend their home from the thugs with shields. This proves it.
I agree. We surely don’t want crackpots getting the message that it’s now okay to kill cops.
But…I wouldn’t mind if some cops got that message. That is to say, I think it would be a good thing if more cops realized that it is possible to cross the line — that in the course of their job, there are acts they could engage in that are so hazardous to citizens, and so lacking in justification, that a grand jury would conclude that they were no longer entitled to the protection of the law, because they were no longer the good guys.
I just want to send that message without any more people getting killed.
I think that the police will get the message. The problem is that it won’t be the message we would like them to get. My prediction is more shock and awe tactics. More hair triggered responses. To top it off, if a cop does get killed during one of these raids, they will simply make sure that the perp is not around to get no billed.
More violent tactics are certainly one possible police response, and not a good one, which means there’s also a practical reason for wishing things had not gone so badly on this raid.
I just think these kinds of raids are an unnecessary escalation of violence, and police seem to rarely get more than a slap on the wrist when they hurt someone else. So maybe this will wake them up to the insanity.
There will be armed men and women in tin foil hats with their fingers tightly grasping their weapons praying for someone to walk through that front door so they can put them down.
Fortunately, no such people exist except in Greenfield’s imagination.
Even if I could imagine people intentionally baiting the police, I still expect the police to act more violently rather than smarter and more cautiously.
Those people aren’t entirely in Greenfield’s imagination. There has been some case law, based on historic common law, that more or less said that when cops try to arrest you for unlawful reasons, you had the right to resist with violence. Those rulings have been undone, but that doesn’t stop some people from arguing that you still have that right and, combined with some questionable ideas of what laws are unconstitutional (and therefore not a lawful reason to arrest someone) arguing that they have the right to shoot cops who try to arrest them for breaking those laws.
Whether any of those people actually would do the things they talk about is doubtful — I’d think we would have heard more news stories about it if they did it with any regularity — but people who talk about it really do exist.
You were, I think, correct in this assertion. & some of these metaphorical tinfoil hat wearing individuals call themselves “Sovereign Citizens”. These are the people I’d fear the most, were I a police officer. These are the poeple who might take the wrong msg from this miraculous grand jury ruling. They may not, of course. But if anyone would, my bet would be on them.