Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke has been charged with first-degree murder in his shooting of Laquan McDonald, 17, on Oct. 20, 2014. The videotape below challenges a claim that Van Dyke was defending himself or others in shooting McDonald 16 times. While McDonald was armed with a knife, he was walking away from the officers. There are defenses that can be made but the videotape presents a considerable hurdle for defense counsel.
Two of the most notable aspects of the videotape is that only McDonald felt the need to fire among the various officers and he did so within seconds of getting out of his car upon his arrival at the scene. The teen was 12 to 15 feet away when he was shot.
While I believe that there was a strong basis for criminal charges, the use of first degree murder may prove more difficult for the prosecutors who could end up with a lesser offense. The most obvious defense is that Van Dyke is entitled to use lethal force for his own protection as well as the protection of the public. McDonald was armed with a knife and suspected of committing a robbery prior to the shooting. He was allegedly trying to break into vehicles at a trucking yard and he was accused by a witness of threatening him with the knife. Police reported that he had punctured a tire of a police car and struck the vehicle’s wind shield. He then took the police on a foot chase for nearly a half-mile as police tried to corral him and protect the public. McDonald also had PCP in his system and was acting erratically. Van Dyke could argue that when McDonald again turned to flee, he presented a danger to society as well as the officers.
Under Tennessee v. Garner, “deadly force…may not be used unless necessary to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious bodily harm to the officer or others.” Thus, the Supreme Court rejected the prior fleeing felon rule when the felon did not pose an immediate threat to society. Under Graham v. Connor, this is determined according to an “objective reasonableness” standard but a calculus that considers the split second decision-making in such circumstances.
In this case McDonald appears to pull up his pants and then slows to a brisk walk. He then veers away from two officers who are emerging from a vehicle and drawing their guns. The shooting occurs almost immediately when the officer leaves the car. A 3-inch knife was recovered from the scene.
Van Dyke emptied all of his 16 round from his 9-mm. weapon into the teenager. The shooting lasted 14 to 15 seconds and McDonald was on the ground for 13 of those seconds.
This is raw murder. If there is a hate-crime statute that should be considered as well, the kid was walking away and he shot him 16 times (with previous complaints alleged by African Americans).
interesting how jt and ds are already trying to justify ANOTHER brutal slaying of a US Citizen. oh i forgot, he’s black, he isn’t really a citizen…. in their world at least… not human clearly….
Darren smith considers this guys Chicago’s Finest (by virtue of his position)…
Excellent morals…….
All the legal analysis does nothing when you are dead. Like I have been saying for years its a shoot first or be shot mentality now days. And individuals that are put in these situations do not have second thought about gunning down a police officer before they are shot to death.
” Like I have been saying for years its a shoot first or be shot mentality now days. ”
I don’t know how accurate these stats are but the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund gives these stats for ’causes of officer deaths – shot’ – see chart below. The total of officer deaths from all causes by year roughly mirrors the ‘shot’ statistics – maybe with a slight downward trend – guesstimated by eyeball. We also know that national crime statistics have been declining for roughly two decades.
We have had some regrettable rhetoric about officers in recent months, in my opinion.
But the stats fail to show any kind of growing threat against officers. Claims that officers are under growing attack is the product of the overactive, fevered imaginations of some journalist, and some officers.
We do have serious problems. But it will be much harder to solve them if we talk ourselves into a panic over something that is not happening.
BTW, officer deaths by gunfire year to date for 2015 is 36. Any officer deaths are too many. But the fact is that 2015 may be one of the safest years of the decade. That is not exactly the impression one gets from news reports or from the alarmist post you see on some blogs.
Shot – by year
2005 60
2006 54
2007 70
2008 41
2009 50
2010 60
2011 73
2012 50
2013 33
2014 48
total 539
Stephen Fleisher:
What are the “three elements?”
dougkinan@yahoo.com
If, under Tennessee v. Garner, “deadly force…may not be used unless necessary to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious bodily harm to the officer or others,” this test would seem to have been met upon the first or second shot. Shots 3 – 16 when the suspect is on the ground, could be argued not to have this protection, however questionable the initial argument might be, and should be the incontrovertible basis for a murder finding.
This is what is going on in America:
Cops are sacred.
The Stand Your Ground Law specifically states that one has to merely ‘believe’ that one is in danger and then one can shoot anyone. If the average citizen can get away with murder-Zimmerman-then it should not be that much trouble for a cop.
The cop can add stress to the situation.
The victim was on meth and had been slashing cop car tires, and was ‘wielding’ a knife.
The victim did kind of turn in the direction of the shooter just before the fusillade began. Watch closely, slow motion, back and forth, there, did you see it? Well it looked like he lunged. I fully believed he was lunging.
Many will think that the society is better off without the victim.
The cop has been overcharged with a crime no jury will go for, so he gets off on the murder charge.
Before he is recharged with manslaughter, a deal is made where he suffers losing his job-but not his pension-maybe some jail time but probably not, and is really sorry, with a psychiatric evaluation that lays it all out as not really his fault, as in the same head space as the victim who was high on meth and where it wouldn’t have really been his fault.
Time and a really really lot of bad guys killing good guys incidents will obscure the relevance of all this.
The mayor, attorney general, and police chief will have performed much more ‘stuff’ in the service of the ‘people’ to allow this to drift away.
Americans are used to this, and in general accept this.
Americans have free speech and circus acts like Trump to vent their individual and collective spleens.
It is too closely tied to the gun mentality and self defense mentality to really go anywhere.
Or Van Dyke could have some newspaper articles strapped to his miserable body and be driven off into the desert to atone for all our sins.
It is really hard to see the justification of self defense on the part of the officer. The young guy wasn’t lunging at him. He seemed to be walking away. Even IF it was justified to shoot at him to stop him from getting away and possibly harming others in the public the officer could have shot him in the leg…..assuming the officer is a pretty good shot.
However, to shot not just once but to empty the entire gun and then be reloading seems to be way over the top
Darren as a former police officer has better insight, I would think, than the rest of us armchair warriors. Plus there was much that went on BEFORE this short clip. If the young guy was high on PCP or Bath Salts or something, then he could very likely be operating at a ‘superhuman’ jacked up level where normal measures would not be adequate.
I think that we rush to judgement based on our own biases and based on partial evidence and on faulty information. The Ferguson/Brown case is a prime example. So before I begin to get the noose to hang the cop, I believe I’ll wait until all the facts are in.
” So before I begin to get the noose to hang the cop, I believe I’ll wait until all the facts are in.”
I don’t think you have to worry about any of us rushing to get the noose just yet. We are still trying to figure out how many pieces of rope we are going to need – considering other officers destroying evidence, ignoring witnesses, obstructing justice.
Even the WAPO is trying to figure out how the department came up with the ‘shot in the chest while lunging at the officer’ story.
I have to wonder if ‘lunging at the officer’ is some kind of ‘term of art’ cop lingo. As far as I can see ‘lunging at the officer’ seems to mean ‘shot for no discernible reason by a mightily enraged cop’.
I am sure most of us will be pleased to wait and watch the facts fall into place – assuming they do. After watching the city sit on the evidence for 13 months hoping it will all blow over, it will certainly be a pleasure to watch as the investigation proceeds as it should have from day one.
In case anyone failed to notice, since long before Ferguson, many of us have been asking for nothing more than timely, rigorous investigation by impartial officials. Lets see if that happens this time.
Anita Alvarez, the Cook County State’s Attorney, apparently has no problems with the missing 86 minutes of video from the nearby Burger King (following three hours in the control of the police).
But then again, Anita Alvarez has a long-standing and aggressive opposition to police being recorded. She has not only unconstitutionally prosecuted, as felons, people who recorded police, she continued to do so even after losing in court on that very issue. It took a permanent injunction from a District Court to stop her from enforcing a law which she knew was unconstitutional because she had already lost in court and been told so
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_wiretapping_law#Court_proceedings
There is absolutely zero reason to trust a prosecution of a police officer by this current State’s Attorney’s office or the Cook County State’s Attorney’s in general. Under Richie Daley the CCSA buried police torture allegation so deep that police escaped prosecution for torture due to the statute of limitations.
That’s deep.
Good find, fiver. But, it’s Chicago, ruled by a Dem monopoly for generations. The murderer cop will be the only person prosecuted. It’s the “Chicago way.”
There was also video surveillance footage shot from a Burger King nearby. After the shooting, four to five CPD officers wearing blue and white (higher rank) shirts spent about three hours in the Burger King “reviewing” the video.
When the internal affairs detective went there the next day to view the footage, 86 minutes, including footage of events leading up to the killing, were “missing.”
http://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/laquan-mcdonald-investigation-305105631.html
It’d be nice to know what the policeman’s defense was.
It will be interesting to see what all the witnessing police reports have to say.
If you think this was self defense, you really need to watch the footage. Self defense can be claimed (theoretically, but really not seriously) for the first 1/3 of the shots (the 5 seconds that the victim was still standing), but the last 2/3 (the 10 seconds of firing that the victim was on the ground) were clearly “finishing him off” after he was already neutralized. Those shots, where his twitching was stopped with an execution, were where the murder occurred.
Except that this is not what the police claimed. The police claimed that McDonald lunged at the officer with a knife and that the officer, in fear for his life, shot McDonald in the the chest.
However, the autopsy showed that he was shot sixteen times which the video confirms. The video also shows no lunge. In other words: the police claims of self defense have been clearly shown to be lies.
From back when the autopsy was released and the police story began to unravel:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/02/laquan_mcdonald_shooting_a_recently_obtained_autopsy_report_on_the_dead.single.html
They have been protecting this guy a long time http://cpdb.co/data/Ld0N6L/citizens-police-data-project
I have a difficult time justifying the shoot with the number of police officers present. Do they not have “non-lethal” means available? Assuming they didn’t, I understand LEO’s are trained not shoot to kill or shoot to wound; they shoot to stop. The initial shots that put him on the ground should have been sufficient to allow other officers to clear the knife away.
Given this jurisdiction, has law enforcement developed a more intense fear of becoming a victim during such stops? This is not Mayberry RFD; this is Iraq relatively speaking and law enforcement does not appear to be winning.
Charging a cop with first degree is also a tactic to make sure that they get off Scott free.
When the jury votes not guilty, because 1st degree is hard to prove, the cop walks, and that is what they wanted when they came up with the 1st degree charges in the first place. Don’t fall for this like most of the public does…
This looks like another idiot attorney general and politics, with a get out of the mess, ‘I did my job.’, card thrown in. Just like the Zimmerman affair, this should be a manslaughter charge. Just as with Zimmerman the idiot killer would get 20 years and send a message that you can’t ‘just’ kill people. As it is choreographed the cop won’t get convicted for murder and if he does it will be overturned on appeal.
The cop had no reason other than temporary insanity, permanent insanity, burnt out insanity, to shoot the guy 16 times. Zimmerman had no reason to go looking for trouble packing a 45. In both cases there needs to be a message sent and punishment. In both cases it is manslaughter.
The administration from the Mayor to the attorney general are complicit in spinning this into some sort of a political dance. The stupidity of the Mayor and the attorney general is that manslaughter charges would show that they are on the job, on the ball, and on point. If, as with that idiot Angela Corey’s attempt at the big time, the cop is convicted with murder charges and does go to jail it still won’t be the appropriate charge. The cop should not have been a cop before the incident. That is where the focus should be.
bettykath is an expert on car theft.
IF (caps for emphasis) Lequon was actually the one trying to break into cars, that was the purpose of the knife, assuming that it wasn’t a drop from a cop. There is nothing that suggests that the knife was used to hurt someone. So I don’t accept that ANY shot was justified. I wonder why the cops went into the nearby Burger King and deleted nearly an hour and a half of surveillance video?