Miguel has a
good summary up, and his co-blogger has some thoughts on
the implications/fallout from this. This is the key bit, although it's perhaps a bit of a long shot as to whether it will sink into the general public's American Idol dulled consciousness or not:
A better public understanding of “no duty to protect” leading to more support for armed teachers and concealed carry, i.e., “if they don’t have to protect us, we will have to protect ourselves.”
Ed Bonderenka
sums it up succinctly:
Would shooting fish in a barrel be so easy if fish could shoot back?
Of course not.
Word.
I think this is a direct challenge to the "No Duty to Protect" ruling.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, if they have no duty to protect, then their only other duty is to collect revenue, at the point of a gun.
Sometimes Florida makes me very proud.
Now if we can just send Florida Man candidates back to the states they came from, before they become Florida Man...
There are 3 parts to this:
ReplyDelete(no) Duty to protect
Preventing/obstructing others trying to protect
Lying about it (perjury)
Supreme court has been pretty clear on #1 with regard to protecting any specific individual, but this was a building full of kids and could be argued that there were enough of them there to be "the general public". There is also the previous record of sweeping any bad behavior under the rug and preventing any legal escalation from addressing the situation. Duty to protect may fall under this as it was a long standing pattern of behavior that created this situation. It was a top-down directive so it will come back to bite the bosses in that ass, but it will end up part of this.
Directing other officers to stay back and actively preventing them from entering the scene directly lead to more deaths, they should be able to hit him with something on this. Not sure if these charges match the actions correctly though.
IANAL but there is some stuff going on here that may lead to change in "no duty to protect". As far as I know, this doctrine of law has grown up around civil suits where a victim has sued a government for failure. This, of course, is a criminal case where a government is prosecuting a LEO. While civil generally has a lower standard of proof than criminal, proof isn't really the issue here. Second, there are a much different set of facts here. Consider the last outing of the doctrine in Castle Rock. There, the location of the perp was unknown until he started putting rounds through the window of the police department. And the original complaint was a custody dispute which are commonplace events. In Florida, it was shots being fired in a school building and the location of the perp was known with a few yards.
ReplyDeleteI have to assume that the prosecutors in FL are deliberately trying to challenge the doctrine.