Well they sure accomplished that by shooting him in the back.old salt wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2020 8:39 pmBrooks was a violent felon who had just assaulted, slugged, disarmed two police officers, then shot a taser at them when fleeing.njbill wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2020 8:26 pm I don’t think so. Kicking the guy after he shot him is a really, really bad fact in front of a jury. This guy ain’t getting off. He won’t get the death penalty, and shouldn’t, but he’s going away for a loooong time.
When things quiet down, the other cop will flip. In return for his testimony, they will either drop the charges or recommend no jail time. If this guy hadn’t stood on Brooks after he was shot, he probably wouldn’t have been charged at all.
What kind of human beings are these guys to kick and stand on someone after one of them has just shot him?
Maybe there are some facts out there that haven’t been disclosed that are helpful to the cops, but they better get their PR machines moving quickly because today was devastating to them.
They needed to make sure he wasn't getting up again.
These Keystone cops didn’t even place Brooks under arrest. I’m not aware if the BAC reading has been released, but even assuming they had a legal basis to arrest him, they didn’t do so. They would have had a hard time proving any charge of resisting arrest without having told him he was under arrest.
Since they didn’t place him under arrest, it is not altogether clear who was assaulting whom in their tussle.
This is classic second-degree murder, like a bar fight.
At the time the cop fired his gun, the taser Brooks had stolen had been fully discharged and thus was less lethal than a water pistol.
Why did they need to make sure he wasn’t getting up again? He had no weapon. He had no car. It doesn’t sound like he was very drunk. He was coherent. He wasn’t a danger to himself or others. They could have followed him home. They could have arrested him the next day. They had the breathometer evidence.
Instead Rolfe chose to murder him.
The problem here, which is something you see way too often, is that the cops refused to back down or back off. Instead, they chose to escalate matters and use unreasonable, illegal deadly force.
Depending on the jury, it arguably might have been a tough case to obtain a murder verdict. That is, until the evidence that the cop kicked Brooks after having shot him emerged. While that technically may not be an important fact to the murder charge, as any lawyer will tell you, it will dominate the juries’ thinking. And it will drive their verdict.