Geeklawyer is incredulous. The utterly discredited and ineffectual CPS has predictably whitewashed the killing of de Menezes by the Metropolitan Police. Geeklawyer was always well aware that there was a serious risk of this but that given the controversy and public disquiet over this they would not ‘do the usual‘ when examining police malfeasance.
Geeklawyer had always assumed that the officers would face a token manslaughter charge safe in the knowledge that the police are always acquitted by a friendly judiciary and compliant juries with the prosecution deliberately offering weak evidence. And everyone gets to say ‘justice was done’.
Apparently even this sniggering contemptuous and derisory ejecta was too much for the state to deliver. Nor will we ever see the IPCC report since it will, Geeklawyer surmises, demonstrate the iniquity.
If the various eye-witness statements remain as they were once reported and not interfered with by the police or underinterpreted by the IPCC & CPS then, far from their being ‘insufficient evidence’, it would seem that a murder charge was highly viable or even a manslaughter substitute conviction a good prospect.
When police officers wrestle an innocent unarmed man to the ground, pin his hands to his sides and then in cold blood and with calm deliberation shoot 7 dumdum bullets into his head rather than handcuff him and ‘disarm’ him there is only one verdict: guilty of murder. Anything less is a travesty of justice.
And travesty there was. And if you say “the police were in a difficult position” Imagine the roles reversed. What if de Menezes had been lawfully carrying a firearm on the underground and heard fellow passengers saying: “look two terrorists with machine guns about to attack the train!!”. What if he had proceeded to shoot them both dead only to discover they were in fact armed plainclothes police firearms officers. What, one wonders, would have been his fate? Would he, like the police officers, have remained at liberty? free from arrest or confinement on remand? Would the police have said “he killed our men in good faith, meaning well, at a time when there was real fear of terrorism. It was a terrible tragic mistake for him”. Would the CPS have said “there is insufficient evidence to prosecute”? Rhetorical questions indeed.
Nor even will commanding officers face charges. Nor will there be a charge of corporate manslaughter though that charge has a truly sorry history.
Instead we are faced with the comical prospect of a health and safety prosecution. Now before dear Ruthie pipes up on that her home turf, Geeklawyer will say these are valuable powers when used to slash at miscreant and egregious employers and manufacturers. Of that there is no doubt, but in such circumstances as the de Menezes execution, for execution is what it was, it amounts to no more than a peck on the cheek and a playfully slapped bottom. And the police cannot even be gracious enough to accept it as that.
There is one law for the police and another for everyone else.
Couldn’t agree more with you : total whitewash.
By “insufficient evidence”, what do you suppose they mean? Both the killers and their weapons are available and they obviously meant to kill him… do they need something more?
And they had CCTV on their side by the way… well they weren’t working that day, as if per magic the platform CCTVs went down, and the CCTV in a moving train went down as well or some guy forgot to replace the tapes etc… good timing isn’t it?
Lame excuses, the tapes are there somewhere, please someone get them!
I can’t believe this the oldest democracy in the world!
Certainly not today anyway
Good night and good luck…
[…] I was going to write about this case - but Geeklawyer beat me to it. His piece is worth reading. Geeklawyer, if you read his blog, has extensive experience of Civil Liberties (I have not met him) and while he is robust in his views and has some very amusing rants on his site - this is a serious piece. So - here it is. […]
Of this whole investigation, there is only one thing to say: it was merdre.
I am a great supporter of civil liberties and no fan of unrestrained police powers but you seem to have singularly failed to address key points made in the Cps statement.
The cps say that in order to prosecute the officers they would have had to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the officers did not honestly and genuinely hold the belief that Mr. de Menezes was a suicide bomber and that if they did not shoot him, he would blow up the train.
Are you saying that the cps is wrong on either of those 2 points, viz. what is needed to prosecute and what the police officers genuinely believed? If so why? You don’t appear to have dealt with these points.
Regards
pb its very simple: if they are to execute him lawfully they must have a proper evidential basis for doing so: “we were just obeying orders” or “someone told us he was a suicide bomber” is not enough and that appears to be what actually happened. They have to have additional grounds of their own to believe this to be true. They didn’t have.
But seperate from that they had him pinned to the ground and unable to move his legs or arms. He was entirely helpless and represented no threat. Shooting an unconcious man dead on the basis that if he regained conciousness he might be a threat would not be enough; lkewise shooting a disabled man because he might represent a threat if he were to recover from his disability; shooting a man who was unarmed and who could easily be determined to be unarmed and who could not move his hands or feet because you and ten of your 17stone colleagues were sitting on them, and you were able to shackle him then that is murder because you can see he is no threat and not likely to be one - you are not using reasonable force in an act of self defence. Simple.
The course of action in that instance would have been to handcuff him shackle him search him disarm him and arrest him. Not to pump 7 dum dum bullets in him because you are not sure.
Well you clearly know a lot more about the detail of the case than I do, but your answer doesn’t really convince me for a number of reasons:
1 whenever people say that something like this is very simple, my alarm bells start ringing
2 you have not specifically stated that the cps is wrong as regards either of the two points referred to earlier. You may say you have done so implicitly but I think you need to be much more explicit in explaining how what they have said is incorrect. YOu put forward several points of your own but you do not directly address theirs.
3 to refer to shooting a disabled or unconscious person and to 10 seventeen stone colleagues seems to be needless hyperbole - presumably none of these applied - lets stick to the facts
4 Personally if I was dealing with a suicide bomber i would not be at all confident that he represented no threat just because he was pinned to the ground. It might take only one very small movement in a fraction of a second to trigger off a device.
Of course it is a tragedy that this innocent man was shot. But as yet you haven’t persuaded me that the CPs were wrong not to prosecute.
You clearly know a lot more about the detail of the case than I do, but your answer doesn’t really convince me for a number of reasons:
1 whenever people say that something like this is very simple, my alarm bells start ringing
2 you have not specifically stated that the cps is wrong as regards either of the two points referred to earlier. You may say you have done so implicitly but I think you need to be much more explicit in explaining how what they have said is incorrect. YOu put forward several points of your own but you do not directly address theirs.
3 to refer to shooting a disabled or unconscious person and to 10 seventeen stone colleagues seems to be needless hyperbole - presumably none of these applied - lets stick to the facts
4 Personally if I was dealing with a suicide bomber i would not be at all confident that he represented no threat just because he was pinned to the ground. It might take only one very small movement in a fraction of a second to trigger off a device.
Of course it is a tragedy that this innocent man was shot. But as yet you haven’t persuaded me that the CPs were wrong not to prosecute.
It might take only one very small movement in a fraction of a second to trigger off a device.
I’m sure Al Queda are working on an eyebrow or sneeze triggered bomb but I don’t believe they’ve perfected it yet: and it would, in any event, work badly in pollen laden summers.
p.s before you start attacking my previous post, i will retract part of what i said about hyperbole. the unconscious/ disabled points are I suppose arguments by analogy - although I don’t find them very helpful.
But more significant is your premise:
“if they are to execute him lawfully” . This is not the right question. The question is should they have been prosecuted for murder or manslaughter.
The cps lawyer, whom i am prepared to believe until someone shows him to be wrong, seems to be saying
we can’t prosecute unless there is a realistic chance of conviction
to have a realistic chance of conviction we would need to show that the officers did not genuinely believe he was a suicide bomber
we can’t show this because they did genuinely believe it.
If you argue that the cps is wrong you need to say which of these statements is incorrect and in what way.
re eyebrow triggered bombs
it is easy to be facetious about such matters when commenting on them from a comfortable distance. If you believed you were in grave danger of being blown to pieces any second I wonder if your attitude would be quite so blase.
You seem to have censored my two main posts. That doesn’t seem to be in keeping with your civil libertarian stand.
I think you must be Ruthie posting under a pseudonym, for thats what she always says - liberals are all closet fascists.
In fact no my automated spam system didn’t like your comments, basedin part on a rapid succession of negatively marked posts, usually a reasonable heurstic of spam - though it rarely hits as hard as this.:
“-14.38
2: Comment contains no URL at all.
0.5: Valid Javascript payload (can be fake).
0: Encrypted payload valid: IP matching.
-11.25: Commenter granularity (based on IP): 0 old comment(s) (karma avg: 0.000000), 5 recent comment(s) (karma avg: -4.220000).
-5.63: Commenter granularity (based on email): 0 old comment(s) (karma avg: 0.000000), 5 recent comment(s) (karma avg: -13.220000).”
No worries. But you might want to tidy it all up if you can find time.
feel free to censor this and previous one re censorship.
on the substantive point I am genuinely interested and I hope open minded. i will await your reply.
ps i am not ruthie!
Now, now, kids. It does seem a shame that questions are being asked and not being straightforwardly addressed. As a hack I know full well the value of breeding contention, but if you’re being asked direct questions, perhaps an attempt at some answers would bring everything off the boil, hm?
I’d guess, however, that as the IPCC report isn’t public, that most of what’s in the PD *might* be incorrect (c.f. the Stockwell shooting etcetera ad nauseam), it might behove us to address points at issue not points of conjecture or speculation.
And I assure you I’m *not* Ruthie in disguise. I’d never get that pink jacket on.
pb: my spam system really dislikes you. Even though having posted successfully and been manually cleared it still thinks you are a spammer? v. odd.
Will answer when have more time.
Pb: you’re getting censored too huh? I’d love to tell readers about the last matter I got censored about, but I fear my life expectancy may be shortened.
Rupert: I’m starting to think that I will be buried in that pink jacket. I think maybe its time the manufacturers bunged me a few quid for free advertising. I’m thinking about getting some pink leather chaps to match. Check them out here: http://www.motostrano-store.com/iconwomenswear.html
There seems to be a critical omission in the discussion thus far, and not just here, but in most of the media, and it is this:
All discussion of shoot to kill policies that I have seen has implied a positive action by the would be bomber: a need for an affirmative press of a switch. The problem is that not all switches require such an affirmative act. With a little time, any typical GL reader could make, with just a paperclip and matchbox for example, or a even with just a piece of tape by taping exposed wires to two adjacent fingers and actively holding those fingers apart, a so-called dead-man’s switch that not only would be all but impossible to detect from even a close inspection, but which must be actively held to PREVENT detonation. Shooting someone who is holding such a dead-man’s switch is the equivalent of shooting someone holding a grenade from which the pin has already been removed. In such circumstances, the one and only one reason for a shoot-to-kill policy is to stop that person moving from where they are currently to a place in which they can inflict more casualties/damage. If they are already in place where they could not conceivably move to a place of a higher targetry value - as Mr de Menezes was since he was already on the train among the passengers - the appropriate response is to contain the situation, to try to move potential victims away as quickly and surreptitiously as possible and, in this case, to prevent the train from moving into the tunnel as that would concentrate the blast and inhibit rescue efforts. Shooting the potential bomber would be the just about the worst thing you could do.
Not only the cps is wrong, but also stupid and dangerous!
Pinochet would be proud of UK’s legal system…
I wonder… Why 7 bullets?
They are professional killers, just 1 would have been enough…
Why 7, just for the gore fun side of it?
And these morrons are getting away with it?
This cannot be happening!
NOT IN THIS COUNTRY!
Or maybe I’m wrong and gullible…
You have surely seen the Private Eye joke..
“Why did you shoot him 7 times?”
“I ran out of ammunition.”
Oh, and another man was shot dead by police last night. It’s getting to be almost a habit.
“Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness…”
Just been trawling through a load of tort law notes, in particular a series of cases relating to the police and duty of care exceptions. After a while, the get-out-of-jail-free “policy” card sounds a bit hollow. Exam answer could be easy though:
Advise PC Plod as to his liability. On grounds of policy, none at all - innocent as the day he was born. No speeding ticket, no negligence, no murder, no manslaughter, no bullying, no racism, no harassment, no grievous bodily harm…