Originally published at: Family of unarmed man executed in his car by California cop Andrew Hall wins $4.9m settlement | Boing Boing
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This is still shocking to me, thank goodness.
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Ah yes, the old jump in front of a vehicle and blame it on the driver. Part of the police dark pattern playbook.
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I think i do take issue with the term ‘exectued’ though. The word you want is ‘murdered’.
Executed makes it sound like it was somewhat justified…
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So who’s paying, Hall or the citizens?
The family of a mentally ill man who was shot nine times by a police officer in a wealthy San Francisco Bay area suburb has received a $4.9 million settlement from the town and county where the officer worked, nearly three years after the 2018 fatal shooting, the family’s lawyer said Wednesday.
Should Hall be on the hook for some or all of that settlement?
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Of course they did.
And some cops wonder why they are mistrusted.
The rest don’t care.
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Exactly.
“Execution” is used when, horrible as it is, someone is killed by the state, after a trial (show- or not).
“Murder” is when some nutter like this one grabs a gun and shoots people dead at random and at will.
The fact that he’s been doing it under cover of uniform makes it an aggravating circumstance.
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How is this even a defense?
Killing a driver doesn’t magically stop the car
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Hall was the actual murderer, so he ought be on the hook. Normally we wouldn’t hold an employer particularly accountable for an act of murder, like say if a Safeway checkout attendant shot someone we probably wouldn’t decide Safeway was the prime mover. It would at the very least require some sort of prior act by the murderer, or at least some unmistakable warning signs. I don’t know if that is the case here, but I would say when the employer arms someone and gives them enhanced scope for violence they have taken on a big share of the responsibility for any, um, inappropriate violence.
Plus it would really suck for the family of the unarmed man to basically have a worthless judgment because Hall can’t pay but a tiny fraction of it. Which I know isn’t exactly how we normally decide who pays, but I’ll argue it is in the public interest that bad cops are removed from the force, and one way to do that is bankrupting sized civil lawsuits. They will normally only happen if lawyers can be retained, and they (like most people) like to work for money, not for free. So it is in the public interest that the city be on the hook for at least part of the judgment (or settlement) as part of funding the potential lawsuits, as well as the actual responsibility I argued (above) that they have.
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So, we basically have a serial killer here?
When do these guys start to get lined up against walls?
If this was a random citizen doing this, there’s a damn good chance he’d be on death row.
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“and now the family is receiving a $4.9 wrongful death settlement.”
Uh… 4 dollars and 90 cent won’t even cover the cost of getting to and from the courthouse.
We would probably expand our suits to include the Safeway if the Safeway trained its employees that killing is part of the job, promoted cashiers who beat people, and gave them paid vacations for the murder.
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Hard agree, that is what I was trying to get at with “but I would say when the employer arms someone and gives them enhanced scope for violence they have taken on a big share of the responsibility for any, um, inappropriate violence”…
…except for some unknown reason I had “movement” not “employer”, normally I would blame “autocorrect from my internal phone!”, but I typed that on a desktop with a real keyboard. Soooooooo…maybe I was just so mad at the state of the world I just substituted a random other word with the wrong starting letters, very little sound-alikeness, and never noticed.
Or maybe gremlins.
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