(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Two carloads of white men murder black man, on video, while yelling "White power!" and later brag about it.

Mississippi: One murder charge, one simple assault charge. Everyone else goes scot-free. Because joyously participating in murder doesn't qualify as "complicit liability" in Mississippi when you're white and the victim isn't.

Comments

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

That sure helped the BART shooting victim.

[gygaxis.livejournal.com]

Or the numerous other fucking reprehensible things routinely swept under the rug.

[cuddlycthulhu.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the BART shooting wasn't swept under the rug. As I remember it, large swaths of Richmond and Oakland getting trashed is pretty not under the rug.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I was more referring to the cop getting a slap on the wrist, like the people in the original story.

[cuddlycthulhu.livejournal.com]

Being a local to the Bay Area, and having read a lot of details that were left out of the news stories, it's my honest opinion that Mershle probably didn't mean to shoot him. For instance, BART police are notoriously under-trained and badly equiped to the point that they, as a department, share their gun belts and, unlike other departments, kept both their taser and their firearm on the same side (many departments don't do this for the exact reason of why the BART shooting happened). Upon shooting him Mershle immediately expressed remorse and attempted to give what medical aid he could, something not shown on any of the videos shot from the train. There are other factors that also don't make the situation meet the criteria for a murder charge, let alone a conviction.

Now, does that excuse the fuck up or the death? No, but if it is true that he did grab the wrong weapon and the shooting was a mistake, that is what the charge (and his conviction) of involuntary manslaughter is for.

The media wasn't helped at all by the family's lawyer, who tried to come up with several very fanciful reasons of why the shooting took place, including a love triangle that didn't exist.

The BART shooting and this one are different because in the BART shooting the prosecutor went for the more serious Murder Two charge and failed to prosecute that, the jury returned the involuntary manslaughter conviction, where as this time you have an attorney who is, by appearances, low-balling the charges to the most minimum amounts.