The Verdict: Murder as an Official Entitlement

Support Your Local Police, Orange County Chapter: Anaheim cops respond to an anti-police protest.

 “Among other lessons we’ve learned in this trial,” pontificated Judge William Froeberg just before a jury acquitted Kelly Thomas’s killers, “is that violence begets violence.” 

This statement was either a conscious lie, or a symptom of incurable ideological blindness. The murderous violence directed at Kelly Thomas by a half-dozen police officers was unilateral, unprovoked, and utterly unjustified. It wasn’t begotten by anything Thomas had done, or failed to do. It was purely a manifestation of the criminal impulses that are nurtured within those who belong to the State’s punitive caste – and then directed without stint or limit against those who refuse to submit to the “authority” of those privileged bullies. 

“These peace officers did their jobs -- they did what they were trained to do,” insisted John Barnett, the police union lawyer who represented Manuel Ramos during the trial. 

Immediately after the acquittal, Officer Jay Cincincelli – who, like Ramos, was fired following the public outcry after the Kelly Thomas killing – announced that he would seek to get his job back. Given that the Fullerton PD initially defended the officers’ actions, and their training officer insisted that the attack on Thomas followed established procedures, Cincinelli has every reasonable expectation of being rehired. 

During his summation to the jury, attorney Michael D. Schwartz, who represented Cincinelli, likewise insisted that the unremitting assault on Thomas was carried out in strict fidelity to the “training” the officers had received.

“The officer has the right to pursue the suspect until the suspect is controlled – that’s how my client was trained,” Schwartz told the jury. From his perspective, this both explained and justified Cincinelli’s use of his Taser as a club, with which – in the assailant’s own words – he “smashed [the victim’s] face to hell.”

Schwartz exhorted the jury to “analyze this case without the emotion.” By this he meant suppressing the human tendency to empathize with the victim; he decidedly did not want the jury to set aside the irrational belief that aggressive violence is morally appropriate when committed in the name of the State.

Once matters of identity are subtracted from the incident, we’re left with the spectacle of a solitary, unarmed, terrified individual being beaten and suffocated beneath more than a half-ton of armed, aggressive strangers. There is no rational basis for describing this as anything other than criminal homicide. 

The only way the jury could conclude otherwise would be to accept the premise that police officers, as agents of government-imposed “order,” have an unqualified license to kill any Mundane who resists their aggressive violence. A codicil to that license dictates that police who kill a Mundane who tries to defend himself must be regarded as victims.

“Listen to them during the fight,” Barnett urged the jury, maintaining the pretense that an act of mass violence against a solitary victim somehow constitutes a “fight.” “You don’t think they thought they were in the fight of their lives? Do you think that they called a bunch of cops there … to come watch them and help them beat down some homeless person? Do you think that’s what happened?”

The video recording of the event makes it unambiguously clear that this is precisely what happened. The thrust of the defense argument was that police are given social permission to act this way, and therefore can’t be held legally accountable when they behave according to their training.

“Their actions were consistent with their training, and nobody disputes that,” reiterated Barnett, confident that this was an endorsement of their actions, rather than an indictment of the institution that employed them.

Many commentators have compared the acquittal of Ramos and Cincinelli to the outcome of the O.J. Simpson murder trial. One significant difference here is that the killing of Kelly Thomas was captured on video, and the perpetrators can’t pretend that the identity of the “real killers” is a mystery. A decidedly imperfect but somewhat better comparison could be made to the 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder case.  

Richard Loeb was the son of a retired Sears Roebuck vice president; at the time of the murder, he was preparing to enter Harvard Law School. Nathan Leopold was the son of a millionaire box manufacturer. 

Leopold and Loeb, who fancied themselves to be philosophers, disdained the moral law as something that applied to lesser beings than themselves. Leopold wanted to commit the “perfect crime” by kidnapping and murdering a wealthy child. 

Their selected victim was 14-year-old Bobby Franks, whom they lured into a trap and then killed with a chisel. After burning the victim’s lifeless body with hydrochloric acid and disposing of it in a drainage ditch, the killers sent a ransom note to the young man’s parents.  The boy’s mortal remains were found through the intervention of what an investigator called “the hand of God.”

The killers were identified and eventually confessed. During the sentencing phase of the trial, Clarence Darrow successfully mounted a defense that was close kindred to the one offered on behalf of Ramos and Cincinelli: The killers shouldn’t be held accountable for doing what they had been taught to do.

Darrow described how the killers – the children of privilege -- had been relentlessly marinated in a nihilistic ideology that led them to believe that there were simply entitled to kill on a whim. This blunted their moral sense and left them unable to repress their appetite for violence. Besides, who were the jurors to judge these hapless artifacts of indifferent Nature?

“Nature is strong and she is pitiless,” Darrow declared during his summation to the jury. “She works in mysterious ways, and we are her victims. We have not much to do with it ourselves. Nature takes this job in hand, and we only play our parts. What had this boy [meaning Richard Leopold] to do with it? He was not his own father, he was not his own mother…. All of this was handed to him. He did not surround himself with governesses and wealth, He did not make himself. And yet he was compelled to pay…. Tell me that you can visit the wrath of fate and chance and life and eternity upon a nineteen-year-old boy!”

The defense in the Kelly Thomas trial affected a similar pose of cosmic mystification in pretending that the victim’s death was caused by something other than a prolonged assault by the defendants and a half-dozen of their comrades. Thomas’s death was the product of “fate and chance,” not a prolonged beating by police that left him brain-damaged in an irreversible coma.

John Barnett insisted that Ramos and Cincinelli didn’t act out of “malice” when they killed Thomas. Darrow struck a similar note in his argument on behalf of Leopold and Loeb, and maintained that the murderers could find extenuation in the surpassing pointlessness of their crime:

“Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite, not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go into the make-up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.” 

Leopold and Loeb murdered Bobby Franks for the same reason Manuel Ramos and Jay Cincinelli targeted Kelly Thomas: The helpless victim offered the killers an opportunity to indulge the libido dominandi – the lust to dominate others. 

Premeditation may not have been involved in the Kelly Thomas killing, but the perpetrators have been indoctrinated in the belief that they can employ aggressive violence at their discretion, and escalate it as they see fit.

Like Leopold and Loeb, Ramos and Cincincelli earnestly believed that they were entitled to kill. Unlike their murderous forebears, Kelly Thomas’s killers will not be sent to prison – a development that will fortify and encourage their fellow State-licensed sociopaths in police departments throughout the Soyuz.

At roughly the same time a jury in Orange County, California was ratifying the murder of Kelly Thomas as an exercise of an institutional entitlement to kill, a former SWAT commander a continent away shot and killed another man in a movie theater. 

Curtis Reeves, who was regarded as the “Best of the best” during his decades as a police officer, took inconsolable offense when Chad Oulson used his cellphone to send text messages to his daughter. After complaining to the theater management, Reeves returned to his seat and confronted Oulson, who (according to the killer) threw popcorn at him. Infuriated by Oulson’s refusal to obey his orders, and acting in “fear for his life,” Reeves did as his decades of training dictated: He drew a firearm and shot the man dead.

Reeves was arrested and – like Manuel Ramos – faces a charge of second-degree murder. There is no measurable moral difference between the lethal actions of those individuals. However, for those who adhere to the cult of the State, Reeves committed a grave sacrilege by carrying out the familiar liturgy of lethal aggression without being clad in the vestments of the government’s punitive priesthood.

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Right to Resist -- and the Duty to Interpose

“Get on the floor! Get on the floor!” ordered the assailant, dragging the college-age victim into a campus building and shoving him to the ground in front of an astonished student. As the vessel of his wrath curled up in a fetal position, the bully continued his harangue.

“Do you want me to hurt you again? Do you want me to sock you in the mouth? Where’s my paper? Huh? Where’s my paper?” 

Unsatisfied with the answers he received, the bully reached down and shoved the prone target, then threw a lazy punch that failed to connect. After a few seconds, the victim managed to scramble away, and the assailant – whose rage suddenly and inexplicably evaporated –took a seat next to the befuddled witness.

“Sir – how come you didn’t help out?” the “bully” asked the student, who had silently ignored the fracas, which was staged as part of an informal sociological experiment.

“I think the big issue for our generation is bullying,” explains the lead actor in this melodrama, YouTube personality and activist Yousef Erakat. “Why does bullying continue, and why doesn’t anybody put a stop to it?” Erakat and a friend, Ali Amjad, devised what they called The Bullying Experiment, in which they staged incidents at several locations on the UCLA campus and video-recorded the reactions of witnesses. 

In one skit, Erakat grabbed Amjad and rebuked him for running away, pointing out that “I know where you live.” In another, he seized his co-star by the throat and then threatened a nearby student, who briefly turned his head to watch and then left without a word.  One student – a near-ringer for Community’s Troy Barnes – can be seen using his cellphone to record the confrontation, standing his ground when Erakat threatens him. 

The choreographed pseudo-violence reaches a point at which Erakat jumped on top of Amjad and appeared to pummel him, and this provoked some students to intervene physically. The Good Samaritan in one incident was a burly male, who grabbed Erakat from behind and dragged him away. On another occasion, a small and physically over-matched – yet commendably defiant -- young woman named Caitlin Estudillo actually shielded the “victim” with her body. 

The point of this charade, Erakat insists, is summarized in this question: “What if no one stopped to help you while you were getting bullied?” This updated and expanded take on the Parable of the Good Samaritan posits an affirmative moral duty to intervene to protect an innocent person who is being bullied by an aggressor. 

Fiction: The "Bully Experiment."

Assuming that principle is valid, shouldn’t it apply to aggressive violence by people acting on behalf of the State – police officers, in particular? Don’t bystanders have a moral responsibility to intervene, in any way possible, to protect someone being beaten or otherwise abused by a cop?

The behaviors displayed by Erakat in this role-playing exercise, and some of the specific language he used (“Get on the floor! Get on the floor!”), made his character practically indistinguishable from any of thousands of police officers whose violent exploits have been captured on video and broadcast to the world. 

There are, of course, some significant differences: The bully played by Erakat didn’t continue to escalate his attack until he had achieved “compliance,” nor did he summon the help of several colleagues – a few who would join in the beating, and a few others who would form a protective ring around the assailants in order to prevent onlookers from intervening on behalf of the victim.

This is to say that although the scripted violence of Erakat’s bully was sufficient to shock the conscience, that of the typical police officer in a similar encounter is immeasurably worse – and bystanders are not only encouraged not to intervene, but prohibited by “law” from doing so.

Erakat’s video, which made its debut several weeks ago, offers a timely counter-point to the murder and manslaughter trial of Fullerton Police Officers Manuel Ramos and Ken Cincinelli. Ramos and Cincincelli are two of the eight cops who beat homeless man Kelly Thomas to death on the street near a bus station on July 11, 2011.

Thomas had done nothing to justify an arrest. (Ramos, eager to confect a pretext, pretended that Kelly had removed discarded mail from the trash, which isn't illegal.) The mentally troubled, 160-lb. man posed no threat to anybody. Thomas died – that is, he lapsed into an irreversible coma – while crying out for his father to help him.

 

The reality: Ramos about to "f**k up" Thomas.

Nobody tried to help Thomas – because Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that it is morally wrong and legally impermissible to do so. This is obviously not the case under the moral law. As Orange County DA Tony Rackauckas acknowledged during closing arguments in the trial of Ramos and Cincinelli, this isn’t the case under the written law, as well.

“There is no legal authority for a police officer to use force to punish someone,” Rackauckas informed the jury. “There’s no authority to use force for `street justice.’ A police officer cannot get mad at somebody and start punching him around, or use any kind of force on him at all.”

When a police officer uses “unreasonable or excessive force, he is not lawfully performing his duties,” the prosecutor continued. Section 2670 in California’s Criminal Jury Instructions explains that defendants accused of resisting arrest cannot be convicted if the arrest was unlawful, and that “a person may lawfully use reasonable force to defend himself or herself.” 

The threshold question is whether the victim “reasonably believes he is in imminent danger of unreasonable or excessive force by a police officer.” Of course, the mere presence of a police officer is enough to satisfy that condition.

Ramos, who taunted and mocked Thomas for several minutes before beginning his assault, slapped on a pair of rubber gloves and told the victim that he was preparing to “f**k you up.”

It wasn’t necessary at that point for Thomas to wait until Ramos assaulted him, according to Rackauckas; the officer’s threat “created in Kelly Thomas a right to self-defense.”

 “A lot of people don’t understand this idea – but the police know,” Rackauckas continued. “They know if they are not lawfully performing their duty … [and] are using excessive force, that a person has the right to self-defense – that a person has the right to resist. You have a right to resist an unlawful arrest.” (Emphasis added.) 

This point had been made earlier from the witness stand by retired FBI Special Agent John Wilson. A former tactical police training expert, Wilson spent 60 hours studying the surveillance video of the Kelly Thomas killing. He testified that the actions of Officer Ramos were improper and unlawful. Under cross-examination by the defense, Wilson emphasized that once the police attack began, Thomas had the right to use lethal force, if necessary, to protect himself. The OC Weekly reports that the off-duty cops who crowded the courtroom reacted to Wilson’s testimony “by shaking their heads and hissing.” 

Irrespective of statutory and case law, Police are trained to deal with resistance of any kind by escalating force until the targeted individual submits, or dies. They have been encouraged in such behavior by several decades of judicial rulings that often recognize the innate right to self-defense against police violence while perversely insisting that citizens have a duty to submit to whatever indignity or trauma a cop sees fit to inflict on him. 

 

A cop's-eye view: They command, we submit. Like hell, we do.

That was essentially the case made by police union attorney John Barnett in his closing arguments on behalf of Ramos. Appealing to what he hopes is the latent authoritarianism of the Orange County jury, Barnett insisted that by provoking a confrontation with Thomas and then beating him into a coma, Ramos “did everything he could to keep the community safe…. Officer Ramos had a right to do exactly what he was doing.” 

From the perspective of Barnett and the police union that fills his doggie dish, when a policeman decides to kill someone, that person has a duty to die. As Rackauckas pointed out to the jury, this morally abhorrent view is a legal fiction – and police are aware of that fact.

All bullying is based largely on bluff. Yousef Erakat, echoing the themes of the government-sponsored “anti-bullying” campaign, insists that witnesses have a moral obligation to call the bully’s bluff and, if necessary, interpose on behalf of a victim. Kelly Thomas was battered into a lifeless pulp in view of dozens of people who have been trained to think that this principle doesn’t apply to privileged bullies in government-issued attire. 

Dum spiro, pugno!

Dr. Raskolnikov, I Presume?

Protected and Served to Death: Kelly Thomas

A certain percentage, they tell us, must go … that way -- to the devil, I suppose…. A percentage! What splendid words they have; they are so scientific, so consolatory…. Once you’ve said `percentage’ there’s nothing more to worry about. 

Rodion Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”

Kelly Thomas wasn’t beaten to death by a thugscrum of eight police officers; he simply happened to die while they were striking, kicking, and choking him. That’s what Dr. Steven Karch would have us believe, or at least pretend to.

Manuel Ramos and Jay Cincinelli, who were among the six Fullerton, California officers involved in the July 5, 2011 gang beating of Thomas, are currently on trial for involuntary manslaughter and second-degree murder. 

Karch was paid handsomely to peddle puerile lies on behalf of the defense.

Thomas, who had no criminal record, was repeatedly tasered and beaten with batons while the assailants chanted the shared refrain of rapists and police officers: “Stop resisting!” 

At one point, Cincinelli – frustrated that Thomas didn’t simply submit and die – clubbed the victim in the face with the butt of his Taser. (“We ran out of options,” Cincinelli later explained, “so I got the end of my Taser and I … just smashed his face to hell.”) Numerous eyewitnesses testified that the attack continued long after Thomas was inert and motionless. 

Prior to Karch’s testimony, the Orange County coroner and the trauma surgeon who had treated Thomas testified that the slender, troubled homeless man died as a result of oxygen deprivation caused by prolonged chest compression and repeated blunt facial trauma during the seven-minute onslaught. Unlike Karch, those medical professionals had first-hand involvement in the case. 

Karch never met Kelly Thomas while he was alive, nor did he examine his mortal remains after Fullerton’s paladins of public order had protected and served him into an irreversible coma. His testimony was both untainted by fact and untouched by doubt: In his view, Thomas died as a result of drug use, not from the lethal ministrations of the State’s punitive priesthood.

Kelly Thomas, before meeting the police.

Speaking with a certitude unencumbered by facts, Karch insisted that Thomas died from “methamphetamine cardiomyopathy.” As it happens, the toxicology report on Thomas’s remains showed that he had no trace of alcohol or drugs in his system at the time of his death. 

This doesn’t matter, insisted Karch, because Thomas was a meth user decades ago, which could have left him with both a weakened heart and a tendency to have sudden, unpredictable psychotic episodes. 

Kelly Thomas was entirely responsible for his own death, according to Karch, beginning with the supposed “psychotic episode” that triggered the confrontation with the police. Apparently, Thomas’s earlier drug abuse had also endowed the 160-lb. man with superhuman strength.

“It’s not easy to throw a half-dozen policemen around,” Karch stated on the witness stand, breezily revising an incident in which Thomas was pinned down and helpless, his face being beaten into an unrecognizable mass while he cried out for his father. “I can’t imagine a situation in which I’d fight with six police officers.” 

Thomas most likely would have agreed with that assessment, given that he did everything he could to avoid the confrontation Ramos was irrationally determined to provoke. If the oft-misused term “psychotic” applies to the events of that evening, it would best be used to describe the behavior of the assailants, rather than the victim. 

After making contact with Thomas, Ramos mocked, taunted, and harassed the mentally troubled man before devising an excuse to attack him.

“See these fists?” Ramos gloatingly said as he snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “They’re getting ready to f**k you up.” 

That gesture, like all of the other actions by police officers during the attack, was compatible with the Fullerton PD’s use of force policy, according to the testimony of Corporal Stephen Rubio, who helps train the department’s costumed simians. Rubio referred to that overture to a beating as a “conditional threat,” a description that could apply to any threat emitted by any common criminal of the variety not imbued with "qualified immunity."

Kelly Thomas’s father, Ron Thomas (a retired sheriff’s deputy) reports that his troubled son had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Ramos suffered from a far deadlier psychosis – one that is highly contagious, as the actions of his comrades that evening demonstrate. 

What a hero: Ramos displays his "battle" injury.

Whatever its etiology, aggressive violence is a behavioral disorder. Law enforcement aggressively recruits people inclined toward such behavior and provides them with a license to express their violent impulses. When this results in a manifestly unnecessary and avoidable death, police unions and hireling “experts” like Karch will insist that the officers are blameless: It’s not that the police killed the victim, he just happened to die in their presence.

“He could have died sitting in a closet by himself,” Karch smugly asserted on the witness stand. Asked during cross-examination if he was saying that Thomas “was destined to die on that particular day and the police just happened to be there,” Karch left that question in the hands of Providence: “Only God can say that.” 

Karch affects the title “Doctor,” but in his work as a police apologist his philosophical tutor is not Hippocrates; it’s Raskolnikov, the nihilistic protagonist in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Convinced that he is a transcendent figure who is not beholden to the moral laws that govern the rest of humanity, Raskolnikov decides to murder a thoroughly unpleasant old woman in order to establish his status as a post-human “superman.” 

“I could kill that damned old woman and make off with her money,” Raskolnikov boasted to a policeman, who didn’t object. After all, the self-appointed uberman continued, a certain “percentage” of people are simply destined to die, and this greedy old wretch was overdue. Besides, killing her would be a socially redemptive act:

“On the one hand we have a stupid, senseless, worthless, spiteful, ailing, horrid old woman, not simply useless but doing actual mischief, who has not an idea what she is living for herself, and who will die in a day or two in any case…. On the other side, we have fresh young lives thrown away for want of help and by thousands, on every side. A hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped, on that old woman’s money, which will be buried in a monastery…. Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote one’s self to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think – would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?... One death, and a hundred lives in exchange – it’s simple arithmetic.” 

To the best of my knowledge, Steven Karch has no hands-on experience with lethal violence. He displays his perverse ingenuity by dispensing sophisms intended to persuade the credulous that the victim of police violence was simply going to die anyway – so the assailants are not to blame. In that role, Karch has not only served as an “expert witness” on behalf of killer cops, but also as a federally subsidized evangelist on behalf of the concept of “excited delirium,” a mysterious condition that seems to afflict only those who are gang-tackled, tased, and otherwise abused by police. 

Such unfortunate souls are merely part of the sacrificial “percentage” necessary in order to preserve social order, Karch and his ilk insist, in the serene confidence that neither they nor anyone they love will be found in that category. 

 

Dum spiro, pugno!