A grand jury has indicted two former Uvalde school police officers in the botched law enforcement response to the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary school that left 19 children and two teachers dead, two Texas state government sources with knowledge of the indictment told CNN Thursday.
I work in municipal government, and this is the one national case where I haven't seen any of the police defending the PD. They're all like "fuck those guys. They let kids die to limit liability insurance rates."
I can’t even imagine being outside the school for over an hour with the cops actively preventing me from going in and getting my spouse or child out, getting pepper sprayed and handcuffed, and then at the end of it finding out they were inside slowly dying of a gunshot wound the entire time. I am legitimately confused about how none of the cops involved in that have not been vigilante’d.
If every single one of them get felonies with long prison sentences, they should count themselves lucky as hell that their community is for whatever reason being so forgiving about it.
Generally speaking, any person can take anyone to court for any reason, and any prosecutor can charge anyone for any reason.
Once it gets to court is where the “but your honor the Supreme Court said X Y Z” comes into it. And in a lot of cases that’ll get you off, and in a lot of cases that will mean the prosecutor won’t even try because the law is so clear that it would just be a waste of everyone’s time to make the attempt. But, the circumstances of the case and a compelling counter argument can make that not the only outcome, and the judge and jury have a lot of leeway up to and including “hey you know what I think the Supreme Court got it wrong as hell in this case, guilty guilty guilty.”
When it’s fairly applied (which is, certainly, not even close to all the time) it’s actually a very good system.
Precedents get overturned from time to time, and the way that generally happens is when a new case comes along challenging that precedent.
Maybe this goes nowhere. Maybe a conviction gets overturned on appeal. But maybe we could see a new precedent set. Might as well try, you're probably not going to find a better case to do it any time soon.
But they forcibly prevented the parents from protecting their own children. It's fine to say you won't protect and serve but by preventing the parents from going in should be some degree of murder. How the fuck could good Samaritan laws work if the people are required to act.
Which means that every single time you see police protecting nazis, it's because they chose to. Uvalde was police showing us who they don't want to protect.
They can argue a restraining order is materially different than a child in danger. There is a duty to report for child abuse and child neglect there isn't however any actual duty to act. Its partially how cps gets away with kids dying after investigations when they make negative notes about but did not act.
I wouldn't be terribly shocked if a caveat was made for this kind of action. When you consider not just the inaction but them prohibiting parents from intervening you have materially different facts.
I don't see a massive change coming but perhaps a narrowly tailored ruling.
You're 100% right. The supreme Court ruled on the duty to protect and on qualified immunity, the only way the state could get a verdict is if it's very narrowly tailored to either "extremely egregious and inhumane behavior" or for "stopping the parents". There's no other way for a judge to make a guilty verdict and at the same time make it appeal-proof to some degree.
And we just gotta hope and pray this gets through and doesn't get overturned.