(01-09-2026, 10:03 PM)Vermilion Wrote: I told you before, hitting a cop with your vehicle is against the law in America.
Yes, it generally is. But it's generally not a capital offense unless it is premeditated.
As I've watched this debate evolve over the last few days, I've observed that most people are not able to carry more than one thought in mind at the same time. Especially if the thoughts are conflicting. So I will just put this out there and let people think about it.
Much has been made of the fact that the driver of the car had been out in the neighborhood watching the ICE agents and broadcasting their location to others. OK, that's true. So what? Exercising your 1st amendment rights is not illegal.
Much has been made of the fact that her car was parked more or less crossways to the flow of traffic and that was probably illegal. OK, that's true. So what? The remedy for that is a misdemeanor traffic citation, not summary execution.
When the ICE agents drove up to the car in their pickup truck and approached Renee Good and told her to get out of the car, they were probably acting within their authority as federal Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs), if they intended to maybe question her for impeding a federal law enforcement activity. However, witnesses on the scene said that she was receiving conflicting orders from ICE agents, with some telling her to leave the scene and some telling her to get out of the car. Obviously, she couldn't follow both commands, so she chose to leave.
Being a US citizen, she was not an authorized target of an ICE enforcement operation, so there is controversy over whether she had the right to leave the scene. On one side of the argument is the fact that she was a U.S. citizen and a legal observer, not the target of the ICE operation, and not suspected of any serious crime or immigration violation. Some lawyers say an American citizen may lawfully disengage from an officer's command if it is unlawful, unclear, or creates a reasonable fear for personal safety. On the other side of the argument is that Federal officials maintain that she was impeding law enforcement's work and refused commands to stay. In any case, even if she illegally left the scene, the remedy for that is subsequent arrest and arraignment, not summary execution.
Then we have the encounter with the officer who shot her. Legal precedent for cases involving use of deadly force requires that individuals employing deadly force have to have an objectively supported reason for using it. That means that their reason for using it has to be one of the legally valid reasons, and that the objective facts have to support the logic of that reason. Once she had decided to leave, Renee first cranked the wheels of her car to the left and backed up a little bit in order to position herself to turn right and head on down the road in the right hand lane. When she did that, she ended up momentarily pointing the car pretty much directly at the ICE officer while turning her wheels to the right. At that point, he assessed that she was about to place the car in Drive and start forward and that he was in imminent danger of being run over by the car. That was a legally defensible assessment, in my opinion. He was only a few feet in front of the car's front end and had only split seconds to act. All the videos show that she was turning her wheels to the right, but the officer probably had no chance to notice that since he was concentrating on aiming his weapon. In retrospect, I think that shows that she had no intent to run him over, otherwise she would have steered directly toward him. So it looks like he tried to move to his right to avoid a direct hit from the car while simultaneously firing at the driver. It looks like the bullet went through the lower left portion of the windshield at an angle that was too low for a kill shot and may have missed the driver entirely.
If the encounter had ended there, the nation would not be having this conversation, since I think the officer's actions were justifiable up to that point. But, since her car was turning right, the open driver's side window passed by the officer about 2 or 3 feet to the side, and he took the occasion to double-tap her in the head at point blank range, apparently killing her instantly.
There are several things wrong with that. First, DHS policy is that deadly force may ONLY be used to protect the life of the officer or an innocent bystander from imminent danger and if no other reasonable alternative is available. That means that deadly force cannot be used solely for the purpose of preventing escape--there has to be an element of somebody being in imminent danger. Imminent means immediate with no reasonable way to escape. Furthermore, DHS policy specifically prohibits shooting at or into a moving vehicle without there being any such imminent danger. When officers do consider shooting into a moving vehicle because there is imminent danger to someone, they are supposed to take into account whatever harm to innocent bystanders might be caused by the out-of-control vehicle. Considering that the vehicle was already passing him and driving away, the officer himself was no longer in imminent danger. So unless the officer can show that he had an objectively true reason to believe that an innocent bystander's life was in imminent danger, I think he was not following DHS policy or the law.
As I stated above, I think his first shot was justifiable. I don't see how the next two were.
And this might affect how this case plays out. As a general rule, the Supreme Court has ruled that when a federal officer is acting in good faith in performing his/her duties in accordance with federal policy and law, he/she cannot be charged with crimes by state or local authorities for doing that. However, in this case the argument will be that he was not following federal policies and/or laws, and therefore can be charged. Whenever there is an incident involving use of deadly force by an officer, the DHS is required to conduct an after-action investigation to see whether DHS policy was followed, or not. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.