I saw this story on Reddit and it raises a lot of unanswered questions. The Examiner below reports that the video was taken by the wife of Gary Grana, 33, who was arrested for firing a crossbow in his yard at a target. Grana ends up under a pile of officers after a rather large number of officers respond to the call.
Here is how the video was originally described before it was removed by YouTube (it is back now):
“This is a video that I took of my husband being wrongfully accused and detained. They originally came because someone wrongfully accused my husband of firing a crossbow in our yard (crossbows are legal in our state). He told them he was not firing a crossbow and there was not a crossbow outside or any evidence of one being outside. The police asked him for ID and he refused on grounds that he wasn’t doing anything to facilitate them asking for ID. Next thing he knew the police jumped him, then the police tripped over our steps and crashed through a wooden fence which injured the officers hand. They slammed my husbands head against my front door, breaking my door (I can’t even shut it properly now and have to replace it) and sprayed him with mace and started beating the crap out of him. All of a sudden my husband is being charged with assault on an officer?! SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE!!!!!”
Despite the obvious tension, there are officers at the scene who are trying to calmly determine what occurred in this incident that left officers injured and a man arrested.
He was charged with discharging a weapon within city limits, even though he was not holding the crossbow when the police encountered him. The police added charges of third degree assault on an officer, refusing to comply, and resisting arrest.
Source: Examiner
I went to work on my prior comment a while ago, baked some holiday cookies and a cherry pie keystroking during available kitchen-duty interludes. Comments appeared while I was baking and keystroking…
During my life, I have known three police officers who were also amateur radio operators. One of them retired and lived into old age. Clarence Madison was a Chicago Police Officer, Amateur Radio Station call sign WB9PME. While Clarence’s life on earth expired a while ago, his amateur radio license expires in just over two years.
Clarence talked with me at some length about the conundrum of police work, the difficulty of recognizing who merited being regarded as a suspect and who did not, and the agony of the risk of tragic blunders that are inseparable from police work.
Clarence, more than any other police-ham radio operator I have known, helped me to understand the situational factors which lead police to act as they do. That I find no fault with the people who act in the capacity of police officers is a debt I owe to Clarence.
It is one thing to find fault with people, another to find no fault with people but find fault with people’s beliefs, and yet something else to find no fault with anyone or anything. I find no fault with anyone or with anything. I find no fault with my ability to find words or my inability to find words when what I would say were I able to say it might be of value to someone else.
Please, please, don’t hurt me. I intend no harm; I intend to describe only what I have learned of harm and such ways as may lead to harm reduction.
As for the comment of BelgianBrain, I agree with his view, not only from doing lawful open court observation in person, but also as a consequence of having read through Loyola Law School (Los Angeles) emeritus law professor, Robert Benson’s book, “The Interpretation Game: How Judges and Lawyers Make the Law, ” book I have previously mentioned.
Perhaps my “favorite” legal maxim, as found in Black’s 9th, page 1835, is “[italics on][bold on]Ignorantia judicis est calamitas innocentis[bold off][italics off] The ignorance of the judge is the calamity of the innocent.”
As for ignorance and excuse, From Black’s 8th, page 1721, “[italics on][bold on]Ignorantia juris non excusat[bold off][italics off]Ignorance of the law does not excuse. Black’s 6th is different, from page 747, “[bold on]Ignorantia legis neminem excusat[bold off] Ignorance of law excuses no one.] and [bold on]Ignorantia presumitur ubi scientia non probatur[bold off] Ignorance is presumed where knowledge is not proved.”
Finally, I get to the one legal maxim I can fully endorse, from Black’s 7th, page 1642, [italics on][bold on]Impossibilium nulla obligatio est[bold off][italics off] There is no obligation to perform impossible things.”
From a bioengineering-oriented brain neurophysiologically scientific view, the way to learn whether something was or was not possible in some particular context is simply to observe whether it did or did not happen. That which does not happen, when and where it does not happen is then and there impossible. That which does happen when and where it does happen is impossible to avoid. I observe this to be truth as truth is known to and understood by innocently little children.
Absent a demonstrably working time machine, every choice/decision/action/mistake ever made was absolutely unavoidable when it occurred. Given a demonstrably working time machine (I await the demonstration) which can change the actual physical events of the past in the past, is a curiously hypothetical nonsense. If, alas, one has such a machine and uses it, the past would have been changed and all the mistakes, events, choices, decisions, et cetera ad infinitum, as so changed, would remain having been unavoidable in the changed past. Time confusion is a wondrous thing, a delusion of itself.
I find that “ignorance is no excuse” is an eternal fallacy grounded in prehistoric and pre-scientific notions of existence which are of the form of superstitious religious doctrines and dogmas perpetuated from generation to generation of humanity through the process of tyrannically despotic coercive indoctrination of ignorance, deception, and dishonesty masquerading as fact, when the fact is that such are contrary to neurological fact, and the such indoctrination generates physically observable (with various forms of brain scanning technology) brain damage in people who, to avoid unbearable suffering from the terrorization of such indoctrination, “buy the lie” in a vain effort to avoid having to “buy the die.”
If the tradition of conventionally punishing people for infractions of societal notions actually worked, would we not be experiencing diminishing atrocity? What I experience is the palliation of identified symptoms of dishonesty and deception resulting in a thus-far-unending tail-chasing circularity of one symptom being replace by another being replaced by another, such that, if we deem the symptoms of a predicament to be the predicament itself, we can readily trick ourselves into believing that the predicament is diminished while it merely takes onto itself a different pattern of harm which takes a while us to recognized it for what it is. During the interval between palliation of observed symptoms of deception and recognition of the replacement symptoms, it may be terribly easy to sincerely believe that the underlying, unrecognized predicament has been sufficiently resolved, when, in actual fact, it is plausibly stronger than ever in its harmful effects.
The introductory psychology text I used as a broadly based, yet decently detailed reference for ferreting out what else I needed to study was Gleitman, Psychology: Third Edition (W. W. Norton, 1991).
Gleitman, on page 593, describes three contrasting parenting styles, autocratic, permissive, and authoritative-reciprocal. Autocratic often is of the form, “Because I said so!”
Perhaps as much as autocratic-style parenting imposes typically-physical punishments for infractions of parental commandments while denying to the child any means of understanding other than blind compliance, permissive-style parenting denies to children any viable sense of safe life boundaries.
My parents were firmly in the authoritative-reciprocal camp. They would explain their concerns to my satisfaction, or would apologize for not knowing how to do that and, either way, would ask me for my understanding of the situation. Both of my parents always regarded, and treated, me as fully being a person, even before I was born.
The predicament of the autocratic style (which I experience as though of the essence of the Anglo-American adversarial system of law and justice) is well described in Gleitman, page 578:
“A child who is severely punished by his parents often becomes even more clinging and dependent than before. The parents caused the fear, but they are the ones who are approached for reassurance. This is analogous to the dog who licks the hand that whipped him. The whipping led to fear and pain, but whom can the dog approach for solace but his master?”
Therein, I observe societal tragedy of the codependency of addiction and the addiction of codependency.
The superstitious, pre-scientific notion of punishment is tit-for-tat. The neurologically scientific notion of punishment is conduct which reduces the future probability of undesirable behavior. If tat is undesirable behavior and tit is another name for tat, conventional punishments are doomed to failure because they are what they claim to not be; in vicious cycles of reinforcement of their central delusional notion.
In the hope of fair use, given the social urgency I sense, from Gleitman, Epilogue, published in 1991, page 833:
” In this century we have had to suffer yet another blow to our self-pride. We learned that we are not sure of what goes on in our own minds. Modern psychology, for all its accomplishments, has made it utterly clear that thus far we know even less about our own mental processes and behavior than we know about the physical and biological world around us. Here, too, we have to confess that we are weak and ignorant. We can only hope that this confession will have some of the effects of previous ones, that here again strength will grow out of weakness and knowledge out of folly and ignorance. If so, we may finally understand why we think and do what we think and do, so that we may ultimately master our inner selves as we have learned to master the world around us.
There are few goals in science that are worthier than this.”
It is my consistently-inescapable observation that humanity has barely begun to master the world around us, and has dramatically less begun to master our inner selves.
Furthermore, if humanity ever does master the world around us, methinks doing so will destroy us forever. The world around us exists, nor for us to master, but for us to gratefully cherish.
Methinks, only when we have been given to understand who we are as individual organisms, as a species, and as an aspect of the universe of life will we become capable of recognizing accurately the purpose of our lives.
We, as I observe, are here, not to master the world around us, nor to master our inner selves; we are here to learn who we are in the context of the universe of which we are. No other goal is can possibly be worthier than this.
If we continue, as individuals and as a species, to destroy ourselves in a vendetta of the retaliatory punishment that is ignorance adamantly proud, we surely shall remain oblivious to the world which awaits us as we turn away from the cruelty of deception imposed by autocracy.
What is more autocratic than a system of laws which can only be known as process when a judge who does not understand the laws confabulates them after the fact?
If I am to know the law, I have to be able to know it. If I cannot know the law, not because of any personal limitation, but because the very structure of the law precludes my understanding it, and, as I have demonstrated, and can repeatedly demonstrate, doing so irrefutably, that our present structure of law is such that no one can truly know it, then the present structure of law is its own petard.
Impossibilium nulla obligatio est. There is no obligation to perform impossible things. Ignorance of the law, when the law is impossible, excuses.
Now, you know the law; and you are excused. And that is a fact of the law.
Any rebuttal witnesses?
MetroCowboy,
Funny you should say that … most of the cops I know, and I know quite a few, would totally agree with you … especially with the lazy part.
Speaking from familial circumstances I can tell you that the cops Im related to by both birth and married and their friends that I know are by and large not malevolent but racist and lazy….lazy being the best way to describe the ones in my family anyway….
“Police also cited Grana and Shaw on suspicion of misdemeanor child abuse. A 4-year-old girl was home at the time of the incident, Flood said, and the house was heated only by two space heaters. The only food inside, she said, was an uncooked bowl of rice, dried beans and leftover chicken bones.””
——
Bukko is right , arrested for being poor. The vid itself told the whole story, trailer park and ‘he’s a hunter’. No doubt hunts to eat what he kills.
This also is more insidious, the arrest for child abuse is for leverage- if they just shut up, plead guilty and not make a fuss the mother won’t go to jail, maybe, and they won’t lose their child, maybe. This is bull, this is the naked face of oppression.
BBB,
’tis not the law anybody cares about, ’tis only the ‘interpretation’. That one varies from judge to judge and from monday to friday.
What in the hell…. these ignoramuses need their asses thrown out on the streets. Noody knows anything, then what on earth are they hanging about for? Looks like they all came to see some terror in action and didn’t have proper business to attend to.
Stop spending? Stop paying these blowhard terrorists. ‘Tis not like they’re going after real criminals or anything.
Cops are supposed to reduce crime for at least the amount we pay them, you know?
Can the police seize your house without a warrant when it is not a crime scene?
BBB,
That was emotional … which is why we all need to have a good lawyer on hand to settle things down! 🙂
Police also cited Grana and Shaw on suspicion of misdemeanor child abuse. A 4-year-old girl was home at the time of the incident, Flood said, and the house was heated only by two space heaters. The only food inside, she said, was an uncooked bowl of rice, dried beans and leftover chicken bones.”
Arrested for the crime of being poor, in other words. Soon the jails will be full. Wait — they’re already full. Time to bring back the poor farms! (HuffPo recently had a good, long article about the history of those in the U.S.)
I wasn’t always so down on law enforcement. Not even after getting a billy club between the eyes while my hands were cuffed behind my back. (Lipped off too much in the police station after a well-deserved DWI bust in when I was in college in 1981. At least the cop was nice enough to take my glasses off before he clubbed me, and the gory picture with the stitches helped persuade a judge to give me 20 hours of community service instead of a weekend in jail.) But after 10 years as a newspaper reporter, writing numerous stories about police misconduct, and having neighbours (when we still lived in the U.S.) who were law officers and who were also surly as all get-out, I’v lost all respect. Police in Australia and Canada, where I have also lived, are not perfect. In the U.S., they are overwhelmingly malevolent.
Blouise,
The initial responses on this thread would indicate that there was not “two sides to every story”. 🙂
BBB,
Two sides to every story … to quote a prosecutor friend of mine … it all comes out in testimony.
“Prosecutors charged Grana with felony third-degree assault of an officer, and a judge set his bond at 10 percent of $50,000 the day after the incident. He was still in jail Tuesday afternoon.
Police also cited Grana and Shaw on suspicion of misdemeanor child abuse. A 4-year-old girl was home at the time of the incident, Flood said, and the house was heated only by two space heaters. The only food inside, she said, was an uncooked bowl of rice, dried beans and leftover chicken bones.”
http://journalstar.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/article_6baa75d5-32b9-5a95-b317-046055f7819f.html
Here’s a video and story released by the police dept.:
http://www.1011now.com/news/headlines/112276319.html
There is not enough information provided by the videos or the related stories to determine that the actions of the police were not justified. The video starts after the police were trying to prevent the man (who refused to comply with a request for identification, after committing a crime) from gaining access to a deadly weapon.
The municipal code of Lincoln, NE does make it illegal to discharge a bow and arrow:
9.36.050 Discharge of Weapons and Other Instruments Unlawful.
It shall be unlawful for any person, except as provided in this chapter, to fire or discharge, within the corporate limits, or on any property of the City of Lincoln outside of the corporate limits, any air rifle, toy pistol, toy gun, slingshot, or any other air, gas, or spring operated gun, weapon, apparatus, or instrument for the purpose of throwing or projecting missiles of any kind by any means whatsoever in such a manner as to endanger the safety of persons or property, whether the instrument is called by any name set forth above or by any other name. (Ord. 15625 §5; July 9, 1990: P.C. §9.28.040: Ord. 9382 §2; January 22, 1968: prior Ord. 3489 §9-103; July 6, 1936).
Moral of the story: If you commit an illegal act (ignorance is no excuse), refuse to comply with the police, then try to seek refuge in your home (were your weapon is stored); the cops are going to try to stop you. If one of them gets hurt while trying to stop you, they are going to call for assistance, and overwhelming force will arrive.
Lotta,
Perhaps Police Departments are over-staffed … too little to do with too many people to do it. Perhaps it’s time to start thinning the ranks a bit.
This vid also shows something I have noticed happening, the use of overwhelming force. It seems more and more that any alteration brings a small army of law enforcement personnel all feeding off the same group hysteria.
I too am hoping that this man has a good lawyer.
Another example of unprofessional authoritarian cops escalating a minor situation to violence.
Interesting that the three stories today are each different examples of bullying. And we how kids can bully one another to the point of suicide.
Rule #1 in America: Anytime you encounter anyone with any authority, they will smash you. Especially police. TSA goons are right up there, only they don’t have the legal rights to physically beat people down. But in the police state the U.S. is becoming, it’s like the old saw about “Boss yells at worker. Worker goes home, yells at wife. Wife yells at kid. Kid kicks dog.” Americans are all SOMEBODY’S dog now, and all the yelled-at people want to do nothing more than take out their anger on the nearest human target.
Get a good lawyer … keep your mouth shut except when the lawyer tells you to open it … be patient … methinks that a couple years from now you will have a very good new door attached to a new house with a private shooting gallery.
This is a f**ked up country … I kid you not!