(Update 6) Carol Anne Gotbaum: Victim Of Death By Government

Thanks to Jerri Lynn Ward, J.D., I've been given a link to the Phoenix PD report on Carol Anne Gotbaum's arrest, detention, and death.

[See the fourth update below]

These three things I know for sure:

*I am not of Scandinavian ancestry.

*There is no difference between "good" flan and "bad" flan.*

*Carol Anne Gotbaum did not strangle herself with the handcuffs that were used to restrain her.

Thus it follows that the Phoenix Police Department, which claimed that the tiny, 45-year-old mother of three small children somehow choked herself on the cuffs, is concealing the truth about what killed her.

Mrs. Gotbaum, who was on mood stabilizing drugs (which she hadn't taken that morning), was detained at Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport en route to a very expensive alcohol rehabilitation clinic in Tucson.

Her family contact hadn't met her there, as he was supposed to, which didn't improve her mood. She had been singled out by the TSA groper squad for individualized molestation, which likewise helped to undermine her serenity. Carol Anne had reportedly attempted suicide in New York a year ago, which suggests that she was severely troubled and desperately seeking help.

By the time the police arrived, Gotbaum was in the middle of a full-orbed breakdown.

"They're not letting me on!" she exclaimed in a cellphone call to her husband Noah just before her arrest. "It's all falling apart." Noah called US Airways officials to plead on behalf of his wife: "It will be okay. She just needs to take her medication."

It was clearly a medical crisis, not a security issue. But those running the Homeland Security State in which we've been sentenced to live insist on treating those situations identically. The last time an airline customer suffered a breakdown, he was gunned down by federal air marshals.

After mild-mannered missionary Rigoberto Alpizar was murdered at the Miami Airport in November 2005, the air marshals insisted that the victim had made a bomb threat ... which was, you know, audible only to the specially trained air marshals, which is, like, you know, why the other passengers didn't hear it, and stuff.

The truth is that Alpizar, who also suffered from a mood disorder, had a panic attack, which proved to be fatal because it prompted lethal panic on the part of people indoctrinated to see the public as the enemy. So perhaps it's a minor miracle that Mrs. Gotbaum survived long enough to be put into a detention cell at the airport, rather than being capped where she stood.

Then again, it is possible -- I'd say likely -- that she suffered a lethal injury when the police (it's not clear how many) tackled her to the ground, one of them putting his knee into her back.

Consider: Mrs. Gotbaum was a small-boned, petite woman of 45 who weighed less than 110 pounds. One eyewitness described the police assault on her as resembling a "football tackle," followed by the use of a knee in the back as a restraint.

[Update: Newly released surveillance video shows Mrs. Gotbaum going to the floor while surrounded by four officers. The police spokesman narrating the film says that the officers "went to the ground" with her to protect her from injury. It looks like she sagged, rather than being forced to the floor, but it's difficult to tell for sure how she ended up lying prone on her stomach. What I find really peculiar is the idea that the best way to calm down a hysterical and obviously harmless woman is to have her surrounded by large armed men who seize her and attempt to handcuff her -- particularly when the specific source of her anxiety is the idea that she had been mistaken for a terrorist.]

She was dragged away to a holding cell, where she was chained to a bench by a sixteen inch chain. She died about fifteen minutes later.

Is it possible that the victim suffered a broken rib, or even a punctured lung?

[Update: Although there is no audio available for the surveillance footage, the police narrator claims, on the basis of witness accounts, that Mrs. Gotbaum was "screaming at the top of her lungs" while being dragged away to detention. This is understandable. It also more or less shoots down my initial speculation about a punctured lung.]

The question is purely speculative, of course. But it is much more plausible than the official police explanation, which emits the signature bouquet of bovine residue.

Anybody who has had his or her hands cuffed behind the back (as someone who has been arrested in two countries and threatened with arrest in a third, I have had that experience) should understand that the feat of contortionism required for Mrs. Gotbaum to die in the fashion the police described was impossible. Well, unless she managed somehow to duplicate the experiment that turned Reed Richards into Mr. Fantastic.

And the story gets even less plausible from there, beginning with the inconsistency in police descriptions of the death scene: Was the chain that supposedly strangled Mrs. Gotbaum wrapped "around" her throat, or "pressed" against it? The former might explain asphyxiation, the latter probably wouldn't, and both descriptions have been offered by the police.

The "official" autopsy wasn't deferred, as the family had requested, until Dr. Cyril Wecht, the independent pathologist they had hired, could be on hand as an observer.

The police refused to defer the "official" autopsy. Michael Manning, the family's attorney, was present at the official autopsy and reported seeing "numerous bruises all over her body."

Dr. Michael Baden, a noted forensic pathologist, told the New York Daily News: "There were a number of things that were done wrong here. If she's asphyxiated, someone else did it." On the basis of what's known, Dr. Baden concludes, "the most likely cause of death has to do with asphyxia and could be a result of too much pressure on her chest when they were putting on the handcuffs and the shackles."

[Second update: Manning, the Gotbaum family's attorney, has put into play the idea that someone may have used the chain on Carole Anne's handcuffs to strangle her. This is possibly nothing more than an attempt by a very aggressive lawyer to tune public opinion in advance of a lawsuit, perhaps as a means of extracting a very large settlement. But it may have the effect of pushing Phoenix authorities away from the entirely implausible story that she somehow strangled herself. Another possibility raised in this story is that Carole was killed by "compressional asphyxia" as a result of the knee to her back. But this doesn't really seem likely, since she was able to walk and put up some resistance as she was dragged away to the detention cell. That being said, it's possible that some serious and ultimately life-ending injury was sustained at the bottom of the police scrum.]


She was shackled because, as I've pointed out elsewhere, for those enforcing the will of the Homeland Security State, the default setting is "overkill." Dr. Baden points out, correctly, that in Mrs. Gotbaum's mental state she should have been taken to a hospital, not a holding cell, and she should not be left alone.

There was no security risk here. The heroes in blue could have handled an admittedly frantic 105-pound woman without forming a rugby scrum, grinding her face into the floor, and cuffing her hands behind her back. They did this because they're permitted to, not because it was necessary.


So Carole Anne is dead, and her three small children are now motherless.


Whatever proves to be the officially defined cause of Carol Anne Gotbaum's death, it happened because of the tactics used by the Homeland Security State -- the needlessly invasive and time-consuming TSA screening, the unjustified use of brutal force by the police, and the culpable ineptitude displayed by both agencies in dealing with what was obviously a medical crisis, not a security threat.

This much we can know for sure.

THIRD UPDATE

Steve Lemons of the Phoenix New Times, a left-leaning independent weekly, reports on the Phoenix PD press conference during which the surveillance video was shown. The most important detail in Clemons' report is the fact that Noah Gotbaum called the police subsequent to the arrest -- actually, almost simultaneously with the arrest -- to warn them that his wife, in addition to having problems with alcohol, was clinically depressive and suicidal: "[T]he police have to understand that they're not dealing with someone who's just been drinking on [a] flight and acting rowdy. That's not what's going on here."

This being the case, there was no excuse at all for her to be left alone in the detention cell for any period of time. If the Phoenix PD sticks with the story that Gotbaum somehow killed herself, the fact they were warned about her suicidal condition seals the case for official culpability of some kind. And it gets worse from there if the story changes, of course.

FOURTH UPDATE: "I'll have some spring rolls with that...."

Once again I'm in the position of retailing the investigative work of Steve Lemons from the New Times, who has examined the police report of the events leading up to, and surrounding, the death of Carol Anne Gotbaum. The most revealing tidbit in his latest account is the description of county pathologist Dr. Ann Bucholtz's puzzled efforts to figure out how Carol Anne and supposedly strangled herself. Dr. Bucholtz, who inspected the detention cell shortly after Carol Anne's death, noted that she was about the same size and build as the victim.

Also noteworthy is the additional detail that Noah's anguished phone call to the police warning that in arresting his clinically depressive wife, they were "really playing with fire right now," emphasizing that she was suicidal and that the police were dealing with "a medical emergency."















How did the ever-alert police dispatcher react to this urgent, life-and-death intelligence?

"I'll have some spring rolls with that."

That comment was made with reference to an order the dispatcher had placed for Chinese food between anguished phone calls from Noah Gotbaum as his wife was dying in police custody.

To serve and protect, y'all.

FIFTH UPDATE: "Tell 'em, uh, you're gonna ... call him right back...."

The title of this update is taken from a transcribed comment made by Lt. Gehlbach of the Phoenix PD, instructing the dispatcher to find some way of putting off Noah Gotbaum's desperate phone calls. At that point, Noah was still offering the police urgent advice on how to deal with his suicidal wife, and he doesn't know that his wife is already dead. The police played keep-away with that fact for quite a while; and judging from the fact that they ordered Chinese food for delivery during the interval, the fact that they were stringing along a desperate husband whose wife had just died in their custody didn't seem to put them off their feed.

Reading the police report it becomes clear that what precipitated Carol Anne's fatal breakdown was the stupid intransigence of both the TSA and Mesa Air, the latter being the regional airline that was supposed to take Carol to the rehabilitation clinic at Cottonwoods Hospital. It doesn't help that she somehow wasn't able to make connections with David Watson, the close family friend who was supposed to meet her at Sky Harbor Airport.

Carol wasn't permitted to board the connecting flight because she was late, apparently on account of a TSA screening. According to the witness statement of TSA supervisor Thomas Greenlaw, "The ticket agent told [him] that [Carol] started making a commotion when she missed her flight. A male passenger volunteered to give up his boarding pass but the ticket agent told him they could not do that because it would be a security breech [sic]. The woman started yelling she was not a terrorist and took off running up the concourse."

Greenlaw, who witnessed the arrest, reports that the police "gently took [Carol] to the floor" -- which squares with another eyewitness account that Carol was "tackled," rather than sagging of her own volition. While she was being swarmed by armed men who wanted to yank her arms behind her back and cuff her wrists, Carol -- according to Greenlaw -- was screaming: "I'm not a terrorist, I'm a f*****g American!"

She wasn't a terrorist, simply (as she told the police who arrested her) a "depressed, pathetic housewife." And within a few minutes of saying so, she was needlessly dead.

It doesn't take a background in intelligence analysis to recognize that a woman like Carol Anne Gotbaum was not a terrorist or a threat of any kind. And it doesn't take a medical degree to recognize that a woman behaving as she did needed to go to a hospital immediately, rather than being gang-tackled, handcuffed, and then chained to a bench like a murder suspect.

Dealing with a situation of this sort requires patience, discretion, and individual initiative. Police officers a generation ago could have handled this matter in a more suitable fashion; there are, no doubt, many veteran police officers around today who could have done so as well. But the traits listed above have no place in the Homeland Security apparatus that now controls our police.

(Owing to some family medical crises of my own -- Korrin's not in the hospital again, although she's had a rough week; I had to take our two-year-old Sophia emergency room yesterday, but she's doing better -- I'm a bit tardy with this somewhat sketchy update.)

SIXTH UPDATE

The autopsy report (.pdf) from Maricopa County Medical Examiner Ann L. Bucholtz has been published. The official conclusion is that Anne Gotbaum died of accidental "asphyxia by hanging," with "acute ethanol and prescription medication intoxication" acting as "[c]ontributing factors."

Reading the report without the requisite medical background, I was struck by the fact that Dr. Bucholtz's findings did nothing to clear up the most perplexing questions in this tragic case. It is still difficult at best to imagine how a woman could strangle herself with handcuffs fastened behind her back, let alone manage to "hang" herself with them.

Odder still is the fact that after somehow "hanging" herself, Carol was found (per the summary at the end of Bucholtz's report) in what the guard "thought was initially a sleeping position." Assuming that she managed to hang herself, how did she end up in that posture?

The toxicology findings demonstrate that Carol, who was headed for rehab, should not have been left alone. A summary of a recently released police report indicates that it was Carol's choice to fly by herself from New York to Arizona, but obviously it would have been better had her husband insisted on accompanying her, and making appropriate arrangements for the temporary care of their children.

The same summary makes it pretty clear that there was a brief interval following Carol's missed connection to Tucson when it may have been possible to calm her down and regain control of the situation: She was regaining her composure with the help of a female TSA agent when the police showed up. Their arrival prompted her to start yelling and flailing her arms again. From there things degenerated pretty quickly.

What if the police had told Carol they weren't going to arrest her, that they simply wanted her to calm down? What if they had offered assistance, rather than immediate detention? In what passes for the minds of some people, even to make this suggestion is impermissible, since we're not permitted to second-guess the decisions of people wearing a government-issued costume. To the same people, second-guessing the decisions of the grieving father in this case is mandatory, however.

One last personal note: In the comment thread below, an individual of the sort described immediately above very generously invited me to "shut the f*ck up." To him I reply: My city of residence is published in this blog, and you no doubt know how to operate Google. You're cordially invited to come out here at your convenience and make me "shut the f*ck" up.

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*Lest I be accused of plagiarism, rather than understood to be offering an homage, I have to credit David Mamet for this line from my favorite political satire.

On Another Note ...

It must be said that any day I manage to aggravate a Nazi is a day not wasted. Jump over to my other blog (particularly the comments thread in the most recent entry) if you're interested in seeing what I mean.

And be sure to check out The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Chicago Police Department: A Perpetual Crime Wave

Police as street gang -- fiction: The murderous, amoral Det. Vic Mackey and his Strike Team crew from the F/X drama The Shield. For the reality, see Jerome Finnigan and his outfit from Chicago's Special Operations Section (below left).

“So I'm walking down the street and I was minding my own business,” recalled Chicago resident Vance Estes. “The police come up out of nowhere, right up on me, get out of the car.”

Surrounding the puzzled man, the police asked if he had drugs or guns in his possession. Finding that their prey was unarmed and not carrying contraband, the officers threw him into the back of a car and demanded ID. Rather than running a background check, however, the police used the ID to learn the Estes' home address. On their arrival, the officers kicked in the door, seized Estes' pregnant girlfriend, and ransacked the apartment, making off with roughly $1000 in cash.

Then they arrested the victim on bogus gun and drug charges. Estes spent eight months in jail following that January 6, 2006 assault before the charges against him were dropped.

In January 2004, Elvis McMillian was visiting a friend's home playing a video game when a police squad “broke out the kitchen window,” he recalled to the Chicago Tribune. The officers stole $1,500 and arrested McMillian on drug charges, which were subsequently dropped.

The following year, police stormed into the home of Rene Guerrero, a 30-year-old paraplegic and handcuffed him face-down, mocking his disability as they looted his apartment.

“Shut the f*** up, you handicapped motherf****r,” snarled one of the heroes in blue as Guerrero complained about his treatment. Another reported said it would be “funny” to see the wheelchair-bound man get up and try to run.

After the police found a gun – which Guerrero, who has a felony drug conviction, wasn't permitted to own – they dragged him to the police station, where he was held for 25 hours without being given medical attention (he needed a catheter to urinate). He eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge, which should have been dismissed on account of the illegal search that turned up the gun.

Anthony Castro, who resides in the same neighborhood, received a similar visit from police, who tossed his apartment in a warrantless search. The officers found a quantity of cocaine and $12,000; however, in Castro's case, they promised not to charge him if he would provide them with a business referral – that is, the name and address of another victim. After Castro provided the name of an “immigrant who had money,” the police raided that man's home, planting a small quantity of Castro's cocaine and stealing some $5,500.

Chad Overly was driving a truck through the same section of Chicago on November 2, 2005 when he was cut off by a police officer who forced him to pull over. The officer ordered Overly from his cab and “began to attack him,” reports the trucker. When Overly tried to call 911, the officer threatened him with a gun.

As is always the case when a police officer beats an unarmed, innocent civilian, the victim in this episode was charged with battery – but the charge was dropped with the officer who attacked Overly pulled a no-show in court.

Miguel Melesio's experience was sort of a combination platter of the foregoing incidents.

In November 2004, Miguel, 18 years old at the time, was stopped by three unmarked cars.

The police “just started searching me and didn't give me any reasons for stopping me,” Miguel later told Chicago's NBC affiliate. The cops had no probable cause to search Miguel or his vehicle. They had no warrant to search his home. Yet they used Miguel's personal information to learn his home address. The cops -- “two guys and one woman,” recalled Miguel's sister Marisol – searched the family's home, seizing some $13,000 in cash the family members had pooled together.

Having that much cash on hand is dangerous, of course, particularly in a crime-prone section of Chicago. The Melesio family had protected it savings from street gangs, but lost them to the depredations of the city's most dangerous criminal syndicate: The Special Operations Section (SOS), commonly referred to as “Sons of Supervisors” in testimony of its elitist nature.

Created with a broad mandate for aggressive “proactive” street enforcement, the SOS has been barraged with dozens of lawsuits involving thousands of complaints from hundreds of residents whose experiences follow the pattern described above: Sudden, unjustified detention and search, followed by an armed robbery by the police and, often, spurious criminal charges intended to silence the victims.

Last year, six members of the SOS, a force of some 300 officers, were arrested and charged with “using their badges to shake down residents for cash and other items,” reports Chicago's CBS affiliate. One member of that group, 44-year-old Jerome Finnigan, has been charged with plotting to hire a hitman to eliminate another officer who is cooperating with the criminal investigation. (Read the federal criminal complaint* -- .pdf.)

Predictably, Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline insists that this scandal doesn't mean that the SOS unit should be disbanded. “The SOS unit has done a wonderful job in helping to reduce violent crime in the city,” Cline insisted a year ago. “There's no reason to disband the SOS unit.... [T]his is four officers out of over 300 [unit members] that are accused of a crime.”

Apart from the six (not “four”) SOS members facing trial, there's ample reason to believe that the entire unit is infected with the criminal corruption that is an unavoidable product of official impunity.

In March 2004, at least a dozen and as many as 30 SOS officers swarmed Caballo's Bar in the same section of Chicago where Finnigan and his comrades conducted their crime spree. Without probable cause or a warrant of any kind, the officers calmly filed in and began searching everybody in the establishment. Eventually the arrested two patrons, Raymundo Martinez and Jose Reyes, for cocaine possession. While Martinez and Reyes were in jail on charges that were subsequently dropped, SOS officers were raiding their homes, stealing money and other valuables that were never returned.

“You essentially have false arrests, [a] false search, you have interference with a business,” relates attorney Christopher Smith, who was hired by Martinez and Barbara Heidegger, the latter being owner of Caballo's Bar. “You've got, essentially, a kidnapping when they take them out without probable cause.”

To all of this must be added armed robbery and related charges. And of course, every one of the police officers who took part in the illegal search of the bar is at best an accessory to kidnapping and armed robbery. And there should be criminal charges arising from the false police report of the incident, which claims that Martinez provoked the search by throwing a beer bottle at a patrolman: A security camera videotape, which Heidegger kept under lock and key for years, documents that no such incident occurred, and that the police calmly filed into the establishment without displaying any of the urgency one would expect had someone attacked another police officer.

This single incident involved at least dozens, if not scores, of officers from the SOS. And this is just one of numerous episodes of the sort that took place in that neighborhood over the past several years.

“We do think there is a pattern with respect to bars,” Smith contends. And as the episodes recounted above illustrate, the SOS's depredations weren't limited to bars.

"I said support your local police, ho!" -- or words to that effect dribbled down the ample, tax-fattened chins of the loathsome Anthony Abbate, son and brother to career Chicago cops, as he employed his 250 pounds of official flab to beat a 115-pound female bartender.

And it's not just the SOS unit, either. Chicago, the Second City, is putting in a fair bid to become the nation's undisputed leader in police corruption. Recent disclosures include videotaped police rampages at bars. The most notorious spectacle involved Special Operations Officer Anthony Abbate, a flaccid bag of arrogance and suet, beating a 115-pound female bartender because the young woman refused to serve the drunken cop another drink. Despite being caught on video pummeling the bartender, Abbate has pleaded not guilty to felonious aggravated battery – perhaps on the assumption that his license to “kick ass” is good for unprovoked beatings both on duty and off.

Just as sickening as Abbate's conduct was the timid, cringing non-involvement of several nominally male bar patrons, who led a tiny female absorb a beating without moving an appendage – any of their working appendages, that is – to help. In fact – in utterly unbearable fact – Karolina was beaten because she interceded to prevent Abbate from beating up a male customer.

“Nobody tells me what to do!” drooled Abbate as he beat the victim, a 25-year-old from Poland named Karolina Obrycka. Karolina also reports that shortly after the assault, several heroic representatives of the Thin Blue Line – including officers Gary Ortiz and Patti Chiriboga -- visited her to try to bribe her into silence. When Karolina rebuffed that offer, the police demanded the security camera video, and warned that if she didn't surrender it the police might “discover” drugs in her car and target her customers for DUI charges.

Karolina, who was born in another totalitarian country (albeit one rising out of that status, rather than one swifting descending more deeply into it) and therefore has some experience in dealing with corrupt, abusive police, pressed charges anyway. She has also filed a $1 million civil rights lawsuit against Abbate.

Abbate is the son of a career Chicago cop and brother to another. In fact, Abbate's younger brother Terry was also caught on tape in a bar fight, this one involving another cop from Washington.

Last July, three other officers pleaded not guilty to charges arising from another videotaped assault involving three businessmen at a different bar.

For decades, law-and-order conservatives have pointed to sensationalist media coverage of the "Police Riot" at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as the defining example of "liberal" media bias. In retrospect, the media critique of the Chicago PD appears to be altogether too timid. Today -- and for the last several decades, in fact -- the Chicago PD has been riven with corruption and institutionalized brutality.


Thanks to federal subsidies -- via the "war on drugs," the Clinton-era escalation of the "war on crime," and in the name of Homeland Security -- that brutality and corruption have congealed into something genuinely murderous, thereby giving those of us not blessed to live in that pungent city a preview of what we have to look forward to.

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*I think it's worth mentioning that the FBI affidavit regarding Jermone Finnigan's murder-for-hire plot offers the most contrived rationale for federal jurisdiction I've ever seen: The agent notes that the intercepted phone conversations in which the plot was discussed were conducted by cell phones, which can be used in interstate commerce, ergo the matter is under federal, rather than state or local, jurisdiction.

Please be sure to visit The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archives.

Dum spiro, pugno!

No Duty To Retreat (Updated and corrected)

The Colonial Minuteman: Proud symbol of the right to lethal self-defense against abusive government agents.

A year ago, the State of Michigan enacted a law stipulating that individuals can properly use deadly force to defend themselves or others when confronted by an assailant threatening imminent death, bodily harm, or sexual assault. The measure specifies that this right is to be recognized and protected anywhere its exercise proves to be necessary -- not merely in the sanctuary of an individual's home, but "anywhere [the citizen] has the legal right to be with no duty to retreat...."

Those seeking a suitable brief summation of what it means to be a free man or woman can find a pretty decent one in the phrase, "no duty to retreat."

To the best of my knowledge, Michigan and Louisiana are the only states of this once-free land whose laws governing self-defense explicitly disavow the spurious notion that free people under criminal attack have a duty to retreat before availing themselves of the innate right to lethal self-defense. And it is quite likely that even those state laws protect not a right, but a limited, situational privilege. [Actually, as a reader pointed out in the comments thread, 15 states have enacted "no duty to retreat" laws since 2005. I appreciate the correction, and regret my error. -- WNG]

Would the self-defense laws in Michigan and Louisiana [and elsewhere] provide legal protection to a citizen who shoots a law enforcement officer threatening the illegal use of lethal force?


If not, they're of very limited use. Without putting too fine a point on the observation, allow me to note that cases of lethal police abuse are becoming increasingly common, and defense against abusive agents of the State was the chief purpose of the Second Amendment -- not protecting the means of hunting, as that venerable nimrod Bill Clinton once said; not just deterring armed crime by non-government actors, as the Quislings at the National Rifle Amendment insist; and certainly not preserving the ability of states to maintain "select militias," as sundry dishonest collectivists maintain.


The Second Amendment made plain the Framers' understanding that citizens must protect their ability to kill government agents when such action is required to defend the innocent. They understood that free people have no duty to retreat when confronted with illicit armed violence from the State. And they inscribed that understanding in the Second Amendment.


I write those words as someone unalterably opposed to aggressive violence in any form. My soul rebels at the thought of taking another human life. I pray that God will preserve me from situations in which bloodshed is a possibility. And I likewise pray that if the defense of my family required it, God would grant me the clarity of purpose to kill those who threaten them quickly and efficiently.


The right to armed resistance against unlawful police power was widely recognized until at least the dawn of the 20th Century. In the 1900 case John Bad Elk v. United States, the Supreme Court recognized that the killing of a law enforcement officer who acts without a proper warrant can be justifiable homicide: If said officer is "killed in the course of [a] disorder which naturally accompanies an attempted arrest that is resisted, the law looks with very different eyes upon the transaction, when the officer had the right to make the arrest, from what it does if the officer had no such right. What might be murder in the first offense might be nothing more than manslaughter in the other, or the facts might show that no offense had been committed."

The heroic Geronimo: Brave patriot and freedom fighter.


Florida Circuit Judge Rick de Furia recently ruled, in the case of John and Cynthia Coffin, that citizens have the right to resist unlawful violence committed by police officers -- in this case, the unwarranted invasion of the Coffins' home and the criminal assault on Cynthia. John, a heart patient in his mid-50s, did the right thing: He beat the invaders bloody, until forced to relent at gunpoint.


Under Black Elk -- and the "no duty to retreat" principle in Michigan and Louisiana state laws -- John would have been justified in shooting dead the armed invaders who had attacked his wife.

If this principle were widely recognized, Mississippi resident Cory Maye, a young father who shot an armed intruder who proved to be part of a police SWAT team conducting a no-knock raid on the wrong address -- would not have been convicted of capital murder.


But ours is a form of despotism under which the immunities enjoyed by the State's enforcers are so complete, and their very persons so sacred, that a police officer can arrest and charge with "assault on a government official" a sick man who coughs in his presence.

Police have a version of the "no duty to retreat" doctrine: They are empowered to use lethal force in circumstances in which neither they nor others are in mortal danger.

A very good example of that doctrine is displayed in this notorious car chase video:



Notice how the chase begins with the officer lying: The driver (who apparently stole the car) didn't try to "ram" the police vehicle, but appeared to avoid a collision.


Note as well the statement at 2:05 into the video: "Eighty-three, I'm going to take this guy out if I get a chance." In light of the lethal fusillade at the end of the chase, that statement strikes me as evidence of pre-meditated intent to kill the suspect.


The chase ended when the officer driving the first car rammed his vehicle into the allegedly stolen vehicle -- and then began firing into the suspect's car without warning. Another angle shows one of the three officers involved in the chase splayed T.J. Hooker-style on the hood of the car, firing multiple rounds into the suspect, 37-year-old Charles Wayne Bennett -- and then asking the passenger if the driver had a gun (see the clip below).

The passenger, a neighbor and casual acquaintance of Bennett, was an innocent bystander. He had no idea why Bennett fled from the police, and believes that it wasn't necessary to kill him:




According to police Captain James Schaffer, the shooting was justified because the car driven by Bennett "was being used as a weapon."


This may have been true. However, there were other options available to the officers apart from summarily executing Bennett, such as disabling the vehicle by shooting out its tires after Bennett was pinned in.


Perhaps the use of non-lethal force would be considered a "retreat" of sorts -- and the police don't have the duty to retreat. That being the case, law-abiding citizens should be protected in exercising lethal force in exactly the same fashion when confronted with the threat of illicit violence from police.


I'm old enough to remember a time when police would fire warning shots. Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff (whose career was a casualty of the Cold War's end) once said that warning shots were America's most appealing trait: "In Russia, the police just shoot the guy and that's a warning to everybody else."

On the evidence of the video above, Yakov -- much to his dismay -- should feel right at home in Amerika, 2007.

Please visit The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.

Dum spiro, pugno!