No Justice for Jack Yantis: The "Smoking Gun" is a Bloody Bullet

Jack Yantis with his now-widow, Donna.

(See update below.)



"Perhaps you can account also for the bullet which has so obviously hit the window?”

“By George! How ever did you see that?”

“Because I looked for it.”

Sherlock Holmes chides the indifferently attentive Inspector Martin of the Norfolk Constabulary, in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men.”

Critical evidence will sometimes evade the notice of an inattentive or inept investigator because he is not looking for it. When that evidence has been found, documented, and then ignored by the investigator, something worse than incompetence – most likely malice or corruption -- is at work. This is true of what Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden calls “the most critical piece of physical evidence” in the officer-inflicted homicide of Jack Yantis, a rancher from Council who was slaughtered by two Adams County sheriff’s deputies last November 1.

That crucial piece of evidence was a “spent shell casing” in Yantis’s rifle, along with what was described as a .20 caliber bullet found in the middle of the scene.

Yantis was summoned to that scene by the Sheriff’s Dispatcher after Deputies Brian Wood and Cody Roland were unable to euthanize one of his bulls, which had been struck by a vehicle on Highway 95. Five minutes after Yantis arrived and attempted to dispatch the wounded animal, he was cut down in a frantic fusillade after one of the deputies, most likely Roland, panicked and opened fire.  Wood instantly joined in, although in his initial interview with the Idaho State Police three days later he could not clearly articulate why.

“Sixteen (16) spent .223 shell casings and four (4) spent .45 shell casings were recovered at the scene,” Wasden summarizes. “These casings indicate that twenty (20) shots were fired by the officers.” The twenty-first round “could have come from Jack’s .204, [but] the FBI expert who tested the bullet will not testify to that fact conclusively,” Wasden continues. “There is no solid explanation as to how that bullet, if fired from Jack’s gun, came to rest in the middle of the scene.”

This is a monumental understatement, given that it is a fair approximation of an impossibility that the round could have wound up where it was if it had been fired by Yantis – especially when it’s understood that the bullet contained traces of Yantis’s blood. This was known no later than January 4^th of this year, when the ISP’s Forensics department positively identified Jack Yantis as “the source of the blood on this item” – the “item” in question being a “deformed rifle bullet” that had been collected on the scene, but not accounted for.

The presence of a spent shell casing in Yantis’s bolt-action rifle means that he (or someone else) had fired the weapon at some point prior to being shot, not necessarily that he fired a shot on the scene, let alone at the deputies. The fact that his blood was found on the “deformed rifle bullet” almost certainly means that the deputies fired all twenty-one rounds that have been accounted for.

Wasden knew this, or at least he had no excuse not to know it. He likewise either knew, or certainly should have known, that this destroys the official claim that Yantis precipitated a “gunfight” by firing on the deputies, who returned fire in self-defense.

The balance of probabilities suggests that Yantis arrived on the scene with a rifle that hadn’t been cleared since its previous use, and that the deputies (to borrow Wasden’s language in describing a possibility he dismissed) “fired in a fit of recklessness.” This would certainly fit the definition of  manslaughter – an unlawful killing committed “without due caution and circumspection….”

According to both deputies’ accounts, as Yantis had lined up a kill-shot on the bull, Wood approached him and tried to prevent him from pulling the trigger, ostensibly out of concern that a shot would imperil EMTs and other responders on the scene. Both Roland and Wood initially claimed that Yantis pointed his bolt-action rifle in the direction of Roland and fired a shot at the deputy.

Wood (l.) and Roland.

“When that shot happened and I started shooting and then I – I assumed he had shot at Cody and I didn’t know if Cody was hit or not,” Wood stammered during his November 4 interview. After opening fire, Wood continued, “I had somehow time in that moment to go, `Oh, if that wasn’t him shooting.’ I know he threatened him. He shoved it [the rifle] out at him. If that wasn’t him shooting, there’s still a round in that gun….”

Roland’s story was that Wood had reached out toward Yantis, and that the small, slender 62-year-old man, who was practically crippled, somehow shoved the much younger, much larger deputy and left him off-balance. Both deputies have repeatedly denied that either of them ever touched Yantis’s rifle.

That was not Roland’s original story, however.

In the report of his November 3 interview with Roland, ISP Detective Jason Horst recorded that “As soon as Wood lost control of Yantis’ loaded gun, [Roland] reached down to try to un-holster his pistol.” (Emphasis added.) What this means is that at some point, Wood had control of the weapon, at least according to the other deputy. Roland went on to claim that Yantis turned the rifle in his direction, and that there was an “almost simultaneous” discharge of his pistol and Yantis’s rifle.

“He remembered the blast of the rifle and for lack of a better term, it rung [sic] his bell,” narrates Horst.

As noted above, there is no physical evidence to corroborate Roland’s claim that Yantis fired his rifle. An eyewitness named Tamara Sue Evanow (see page 236 of the Attorney General’s comprehensive file on the case) told ISP investigators that Yantis never pointed his rifle at either deputy. While Roland and Wood have claimed that Yantis was angry and aggressive, in Evanow’s account the rancher was composed and focused. The deputies, by way of contrast, were flustered and panicking.

“She was looking out her mirror and she saw the guy with the gun (Yantis) point down at the bull, then put his hand over up to his forehead like he had wiped it,” recites the ISP report. “There were also officers present. She thought he couldn’t do it and then heard someone yell `shoot that thing’ and just kept screaming at him (Yantis), `Shoot that thing.’… While still looking in her mirror, she saw the man (Yantis) turn to face whoever was yelling at him. She did not know who was yelling because there was a police car parked right behind her which obstructed her view. When she turned, the gun was still pointing toward the animal. She then heard approximately 4 to 5 gunshots.”

After the shooting began, Evanow’s husband grabbed her by the head and pulled her down. When she looked up again, she saw the deputies “throw a man to the ground, with a knee in the back….” Since this happened within seconds of the shooting, the prone figure had to have been the mortally wounded Yantis.

In every officer-involved fatal shooting, as I have noted before, the dead person is identified as the “suspect,” and the killer or killers will be designated as the victim(s). This means that every investigation of an incident of this kind is inevitably designed to build a case against the decedent, rather than to determine whether the shooters committed a criminal act.

All that is necessary to indict a suspect is for a prosecutor – or a grand jury – to decide that probable cause exists that a criminal act was committed. When police officers commit an act of homicide, however, the district attorney (or, in this case, a special prosecutor) will, in effect, try the case in a non-adversarial proceeding – and dismiss it without an indictment if he concludes that the charges cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

The only important witnesses to the Yantis shooting, Wasden pretends, are Yantis’s wife, Donna; his nephew, Rowdy Paradis; and the two perpetrators, deputies Roland and Wood.

“The ultimate question is whether, when weighing these contradictory accounts, a jury would have reasonable doubt as to whether the officers’ use of deadly force was not `reasonably necessary,’” Wasden intones. He insists that a “capable defense attorney would highlight the basis for doubt by contrasting the observations of Rowdy and Donna with those of Wood and Roland.”

Yes, the job of a defense attorney is to force the state to prove the charges against the defendants – a task for which Wasden clearly had no appetite. If he had, he would have underscored the contradictions in the accounts (such as Roland’s original admission that Wood at one point controlled Yantis’s rifle) offered by the shooters, and the absence of physical evidence supporting the claim that Yantis had fired his rifle on the scene. He would also point out that at least three witnesses not involved in the shooting contradict key claims made by the men who killed Yantis.

For Wasden, however, the only evidence that ultimately mattered was the self-serving, and self-contradictory, stories told by the privileged predators who killed the man they had summoned to carry out a dangerous task that was beyond their competence.

“While the officers’ stories are not identical with each other in every detail, there is sufficient consistency between them to create, at a minimum, reasonable doubt regarding whether their actions were not justified,” declares Wasden in the written equivalent of a “sucks to be you” shrug. Once again, in any fatal shooting carried out by people not invested with Blue Privilege, the applicable threshold for an indictment would be probable cause, not proof beyond reasonable doubt.

Wasden and his underlings have certainly displayed a willingness to indict Mundanes on the flimsiest of pretexts.

A decade ago, Wasden’s office filed a felony criminal complaint against Carol Asher, a 66-year-old retired schoolteacher, accusing her of “perjury” because she had the temerity to act as a conscientious juror in a spurious and abusive drug prosecution.   

The only “evidence” sustaining that indictment was the unsupported claim of the jury foreman. That state-worshiping invertebrate who violated the confidentiality of jury deliberations to tell the aggrieved prosecutor that Asher had stated, correctly, that jurors have plenary authority to try both the facts and the law of a case, and that the judge’s rulings regarding the applicable law are advisory, rather than authoritative.

If she had been convicted of perjury, Asher would have faced a 14-year prison sentence. The alacrity with which Wasden’s office sought an indictment against her – for the supposed offense of telling fellow jurors to examine the prosecution’s evidence critically --  offers a telling contrast to the enervating, tax-devouring nine-month exercise in contriving “reasonable doubt” on behalf of two deputies who gunned down an innocent man without legal justification.

Sometimes an investigator will miss critical evidence because he doesn’t know where to look for it. Wasden had the most important evidence in his possession – a proverbial smoking gun in the form of a bloody bullet – and deliberately chose to ignore it, and his office continues to misdirect public attention away from it. This is culpable malfeasance in the service of murderous impunity. 

                                             Update, August 14


In the comments below, Paul Bonneau points out that there is some confusion in the FBI document as to whether the item being discussed is a "bullet" or a "case."

"People use the word `bullet' all the time when they really mean `cartridge,' so maybe the confusion got injected at some point by an ignorant secretary or other functionary," he observes. If the item was a spent case, then one likely explanation is that Yantis arrived on the scene with an empty case in the chamber, ejected it, and that it wound up spattered by his blood after he was shot.

"If there was also a spent case in Yantis' rifle, along with the one on the ground that received blood spatter, that means Yantis actually did get a shot off into the bull," he continues.  "That shot may have been the thing that precipitated the cops' panic if one or both of them did not expect it. Sounds like manslaughter to me."

This reconstruction would make sense in light of Mrs. Evanow's testimony that Yantis kept his rifle pointed at the bull during the entire incident, as one of the deputies screamed at him to shoot the creature. This would mean that after he pulled the trigger, Wood would have grabbed (or at least tried to grab) the gun, causing one or both of them to lose balance. This would have lead to a moment of confusion in which Roland -- who has said he had "tunnel vision" on Yantis's gun -- to start shooting out of the "no hesitation" officer safety reflex, and Wood to join in.

On this construction, Yantis did everything he was told to do by the deputies, and was killed by them when they panicked. That would indeed constitute the crime of manslaughter.

We're left with the fact that the presence of Yantis's blood on the "bullet" was a piece of evidence that would have sent the investigation in a direction the AG's office did not want to go -- which would have meant investigating this incident as a criminal homicide, rather than ratifying it as a "justified" use of lethal force by the officers.
 

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast also examines the most recent revelations in the Jack Yantis case:

Dum spiro, pugno!

Sheriff Zollman -- What Will You Tell Jack Yantis's Widow?

No, they won't forget: Adams County residents at the site where deputies gunned down Jack Yantis.

Residents of Adams County, Idaho, should compel Sheriff Ryan Zollman – by nailing his feet to the floor, if necessary -- to answer this question: Are you willing to tell Donna Yantis to her face that her husband Jack deserved to die?

If Zollman answers that question in the negative, he should be forced to answer this one: Are you willing to fire the deputies who perforated Jack Yantis with gunshots, even though they will be spared criminal prosecution, because they killed an innocent man?

Assuming that Zollman isn’t willing to do either of the foregoing, he should candidly admit to the public supposedly served by his office that their lives are less valuable than those of his deputies; that the testimony of a local citizen is never to be credited when that citizen accuses deputies of misconduct; that the personal safety of his deputies is the only important consideration in any encounter with a member of the public; and that he is willing to protect the job security of deputies who have exhibited lethal incompetence even when this means putting the public at avoidable risk.

Donna in recovery: What will you tell her, Ryan?

If he were any part of a man, Zollman would have fired Deputies Cody Roland and Brian Wood immediately after last November’s fatal shooting. Instead, he is accusing critics of his department of enlisting in the mythical “war on police.”

“It’s clear that in the nation, law enforcement, we’re under attack, and we just have a reason here in Adams County,” simpered Zollman in a television interview shortly after Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden made the entirely predictable announcement that Roland and Wood would not face criminal charges.

Zollman invites the public to pretend that the deputies, not the man they killed without cause or the prospect of facing accountability, are the victims, their egos gravely wounded by criticism from the public that has continued to pay their salaries and – for reasons that defy my understanding --  retains an ingenuous belief in the legitimacy of their profession.

People who pursue a career in law enforcement rarely expose themselves to peril, and are often burdened with an overdeveloped capacity for self-pity. From the moment the Adams County deputies gunned down a rancher in an act of criminally negligent homicide – after pleading with him to finish a dangerous task that exceeded their subsidized but inadequate skill-set – Zollman and his comrades made protection of the killers their highest priority.

To understand how law enforcement administrators would deal with an incident of this kind in a relatively civilized country, it’s useful to recall how Haraldur Johannessen, Reykjavik’s Chief of Police, reacted after his officers fatally shot a man who had been sniping at pedestrians from an apartment window. That December 2, 2013 episode was the first fatal police shooting of a suspect by police in Iceland … well, in the entire history of that country since it achieved independence in 1944.

“Police regret this incident and would like to extend their condolences to the family of the man,” Johannessen said during a press conference following the incident.

None of the officers involved in the raid regarded what they did as heroic. While acknowledging that deadly force had to be used to protect the public, several of the officers – soul-sick over their involvement in ending an irreplaceable human life – sought grief counseling. Their ability to see a violent criminal suspect as a fellow human being didn’t detract from their efficiency and professionalism.

 

First of its kind: Iceland lethal force incident, 2013.

I suspect that this is because police in Iceland, whatever else can be said about their training and professional conduct, have not been marinated in the same “No Hesitation” – “Officer Safety uber alles” indoctrination that is de rigueur for American law enforcement personnel, and that unlike their American counterparts Icelandic police are not protected by the pernicious legal fiction called “qualified immunity.”   

The US(S)A is a country in which a police officer who risks his life by using non-lethal tactics to end a violent confrontation can be threatened with administrative punishment – or can find himself fired outright and subject to official retaliation for exposing the abusive behavior of his former comrades.

That the deputies who slaughtered Jack Yantis were never in substantial danger of prosecution was made clear by Zollman’s eagerness to reinstate them to patrol duty within days of the killing – long before the Attorney General had completed the cynical charade of an investigation. In late November, just two weeks after Yantis’s funeral, Zollman told the Idaho Statesman that the deputies would return “when they tell me they’re good to go. Some come back quicker, some come back later.”

The only practical consideration, apparently, was the emotional resilience of the killers. Zollman was prepared to put them back on patrol the moment they had overcome whatever trivial misgivings they may have had about killing the next time an opportunity presented itself.

Jack Yantis, obviously, is never coming back. His wife Donna, who was assaulted on the scene and shackled by the men who had just executed her husband, did rebound from the heart attack precipitated by the criminal actions of Zollman’s deputies, but she will never fully recover from the loss she suffered at their hands.

What happened to Yantis and his family, from Zollman’s perspective, was a shame. The real tragedy would be if the deputies who gunned him down and then left him to bleed to death were to lose their entitlements as members of the punitive caste.

While the Yantis family absorbed the horror of what Zollman’s deputies had done to them, Zollman – with the help of other local agencies – assigned tax-subsidized manpower to guard the homes of the men who killed him. This was done despite the fact that Wood was characterized by one of his colleagues as a “sociopath” capable of killing fellow officers if they were sent to arrest him.

At about that time, Wood was the subject of an “officer safety” flier, even though the public at large wasn’t warned of the danger he represented. 

From this we can learn everything necessary to know about the priorities of those who presume to rule us, but there is additional evidence to consider as well.

 

Roland: Odd how the bodycam wasn't on.

“Is he coming back as an Officer in Adams County and when?” asked Adams County resident Janet Fields of Tami J. Faulhaber, a Senior Investigator in the Idaho Attorney General’s office, in a May 2 email. The question referred to Deputy Roland, from whom Fields had received Facebook comments she considered threatening in nature.

“This seems to be getting worse as your Department allows the two officers that shot and killed Jack Yantis to walk around beating their chests,” Fields protested. “The people in this community, my husband and myself are tired of being afraid of the very people who are supposed to be here to protect and serve us. I am tired of feeling like I have to have a tape recorder … every time I go to the grocery store in town or that our CCP [Concealed Carry Permit] may get us shot by the very people who issued them.”

Officials did take the concerns of local citizens into account – which is to say, they treated them as threats to the safety of the men who killed Jack Yantis.

“Paul – we have discussed here in the office a concern that we have for the safety of the officers when the announcement is made, regardless of what the decision is,” wrote Carl Ericson, Legal Counsel for the Idaho Risk Management Program, in a July 21 email to Paul Panther of the AG’s office. “There is a legitimate worry about possible vigilantism and it could pose a risk to the officers if charges are filed against them and they have not been taken into custody (or voluntarily surrendered) at the time the decision is announced. On the other hand, if no charges are being filed, they may want to leave town to protect themselves prior to the announcement of no charges…. It would be more difficult if they are given a heads up that no charges are being filed and they then start broadcasting it to the world before the announcement.”

 

How they're trained: Shoot first, no questions.

Roland and Wood, who have been taking victory laps in the media, are not in danger of being lynched, and they never were. As noted previously, Roland and Wood were also never in serious danger of being charged, because this killing – like every fatal officer-involved shooting – was investigated as an “assault on law enforcement.”

Rather than seeking to establish probable cause –as he would in any similar case not involving the State’s costumed enforcers – AG Wasden used the investigation to build a case against the dead victim.

To conclude that there was no basis for filing criminal charges against Roland and Wood is, inescapably, the same thing as concluding that Yantis deserved to die. If Roland and Wood had been acquitted following a trial, the public could reasonably conclude that the deputies were in the wrong, and that Yantis was an innocent victim, and that the evidence simply wasn’t adequate to support a conviction.

Whether or not the deputies had been convicted of a crime (most likely manslaughter), there is a sense in which a trial was necessary to clear the name of their victim. By refusing to allow the prosecution to proceed, however, Wasden effectively convicted Jack Yantis of attempting, or at least threatening, to murder Deputies Roland and Wood–and in doing so he contradicts abundant evidence that should have been examined by a jury of Adams County citizens.

Jack Yantis must have been a criminal, because otherwise the deputies wouldn’t have killed him.  That is Sheriff Zollman’s position on the issue. Is he willing to say this to Donna Yantis?

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast: Yes, the government has a "list"; what have you done to earn a place of honor therein? 

Dum spiro, pugno!