Police in Ocean City Maryland tasered a 17-year-old teenager after they accused him of vaping yesterday.
The teenager who had his hands up and was not in any way physically interacting with police (let alone physically resisting) when he was tasered, collapsed unconscious on the ground, was then hogtied, and placed in a police van.
Apologies this should have had a content warning for police violence.
(I almost always tweet from my laptop at home. I tweeted this from my phone, where I am less adept at attaching video - which @Maverick_Queens DMed me - so my initial caption was incomplete.)
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A reminder as various states pass bills that would make it easier to own and carry guns: 61% of gun deaths are suicides.
CW: suicide
The rate of suicide in the US is three times that of any other developed country, because not only is it easier to kill yourself with a gun, you are much less likely to survive a suicide attempt made with a gun. tuftsdaily.com/opinion/2021/0…
Suicides are barely part of the gun violence discourse.
By contrast, mass shootings comprise 0.2% of gun deaths and yet dominate the conversation.
A court has granted Fulton County DA Fani Willis' motion to recuse her office from prosecuting Atlanta police officer Garrett Rolfe in the killing of Rayshard Brooks last summer.
The Georgia Attorney General will now appoint a new prosecutor to the case. ajc.com/news/crime/jud…
It is now almost a year to the date that Mr. Brooks was killed.
Rolfe has not even been indicted in the killing and has been reinstated to the police force.
Willis argued that her office had a conflict of interest because her predecessor used video of Mr. Brooks's killing in reelection campaign.
SCOTUS says it's unconstitutional to execute someone who is intellectually disabled. Prosecutors argue Black people score lower on IQ tests because they are biased, so they INFLATE their scores, making them eligible for the death penalty.
The courts use a threshold of 70 to decide whether someone is intellectually disabled. A Black person who scores just under 70, will have their score artificially inflated - in what's called an "ethnic adjustment. nytimes.com/2021/01/11/opi…
A White person who scores just under 70 will not have their score adjusted. So they will be ruled intellectually disabled.
Daniel Pantaleo didn't get away with killing Eric Garner because there wasn't legislation in place to hold him accountable, but because the Staten Island DA deliberately didn't present a strong case to the grand jury.
Tish James herself could have indicted the cops who killed Daniel Prude under current legislation, but she chose to put on witnesses who argued the cops who killed him were justified.
She didn't want to get an indictment.
New legislation is not needed to hold cops accountable.
If prosecutors want to get indictments they can do it now. They're the ones who need to be held accountable for choosing not to do that.
It's interesting the way people think when prosecutors are presenting cases against cops to a grand jury, they're meant to present all the evidence good and bad.
I promise you this is *not* what they do when they present against ordinary people. They try to get an indictment.
The only duty a prosecutor has is not to mislead a grand jury and to present what would be described as exculpatory evidence. For instance, if a defendant had a credible alibi a prosecutor would have to inform the grand jury.
But presenting a state witness who argues that the defendant was justified in killing someone, no. Absolutely not. Never ever.
People celebrating @NewYorkStateAG's proposed legislation that supposedly makes it easier to prosecute cops, should remember James presented the case against the cops who killed Daniel Prude to a grand jury, but also called an expert who testified that the killing was justified.
In that case, AG James claimed that she presented the strongest possible case to the grand jury in an attempt to indict the police officers, but she called Dr. Gary Vilke as the state's expert witness and he concluded that the cops were not responsible for Mr. Prude's death.
He concluded that Mr. Prude died due to "excited delirium." This is a diagnosis that is not recognized by the American Medical Association or American Psychiatric Association and is used to justify police violence against Black and Brown people. brookings.edu/blog/how-we-ri…