How the Supreme Court Gave Cops a License to Kill
Really good piece, please read the whole thing.
"As it is, Chauvins attorneys have taken to citing the 1989 Supreme Court case Graham v. Connorand doing it so frequently that youd think a man named Graham V. Connor told Chauvin he could get away with murder. In a way, thats exactly what the case did. Graham v. Connor changed the use-of-force guidelines for police all across the country, allowing them to be more violent and homicidal.
To understand how one case has authorized brutality, you have to appreciate that our only real constitutional protection from police violence is the Fourth Amendments prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure. Unreasonable was, naturally, poorly defined by the collection of white men who wrote and ratified the Constitution and determined that things such as slavery and genocide were totally reasonable uses of state power. Still, for most of American history, the Fourth Amendment followed a reasonable [white] man standard: The actions of the government, or its agents, were judged through the lens of what an average person would find reasonable.
In practice, this allowed for plenty of abuse. Victims of police brutality had to show that officers acted unreasonably and with malicious intent. As one can imagine, it was always hard for victims (or their surviving family members) to prove that a violently homicidal police officer intended to kill them. Before camera phones, it was nearly impossible to get white people to believe the cops acted like Black people have always said they do.
Graham v. Connor took this loophole and made it so big that whole police forces could simply saunter right through it. Instead of limiting police use of force to what a reasonable person might expect, the Supreme Court said that force could only be judged against what a reasonable officer on the scene would do. In the actual Graham v. Connor case, that meant the court found that a reasonable officer could slam Dethorne Grahams head into his car and break his foot, because Graham was resisting arrest, never mind that he was a diabetic going into shock who was being detained on the suspicion that he stole some orange juicewhich he did not."
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/chauvin-supreme-court/
El Supremo
(20,365 posts)On edit: 1988 - the same year of this movie.
TwilightZone
(25,471 posts)As noted in the sub-heading and in the article.
"Derek Chauvins defense team is hoping that the 1989 Graham v. Connor ruling will be his ticket to acquittal."
"As it is, Chauvins attorneys have taken to citing the 1989 Supreme Court case Graham v. Connorand doing it so frequently that youd think a man named Graham V. Connor told Chauvin he could get away with murder. In a way, thats exactly what the case did. Graham v. Connor changed the use-of-force guidelines for police all across the country, allowing them to be more violent and homicidal. "
SheltieLover
(57,073 posts)This has got to go!!!!