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baseballguy2001 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 14, 2021 11:08 am This is straight from the Minnesota Statues - Manslaughter 2 - (1) by the person's culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk, and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another; - She meant to grab the Taser and grabbed her gun instead.

Open & shut.

I am not as sure as you that it is open and shut. I would also need to read their legal definition of culpable negligence. I am assuming that it is similar to ours. But my bigger questions are how did she create "an unreasonable risk"? What did she do that created this risk? And what was her mental state when she did it? And I am also pretty sure that the video clearly shows that she did not "consciously takes chances" of causing a death or harm. If she honestly thought she was pulling her Taser, you cannot show the risk of killing was "consciously".

Obviously, I am not taking into account any of the politics of the situation, just the actual incident. I am also basing this on my understanding of the law, which is based on Texas and not Minnesota. Both factors will make a difference in the outcome of any trial.

philip964 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 13, 2021 7:12 pm Wouldn’t this be manslaughter?

By your actions you kill someone and it was not your intention.

There is another aspect to manslaughter that is required, a culpable mental state. In Texas, you must do this recklessly, which means you are aware of a risk and disregard the possibility. That does not apply in this case.

There is a possibility of a charge of criminally negligent homicide. This is killing someone through criminal negligence, which is defined as:

A person acts with criminal negligence, or is criminally negligent, with respect to circumstances surrounding his conduct or the result of his conduct when he ought to be aware of a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the circumstances exist or the result will occur. The risk must be of such a nature and degree that the failure to perceive it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise under all the circumstances as viewed from the actor's standpoint.

This is a very high standard for negligence and very hard to prove. About the only way this could be shown for this case is if it was proven that her taser training included the possible confusion of it and a pistol (very likely it did), it included some practices on how to avoid this (such as carrying the taser on the opposite side from the pistol - again very likely it did), and she made a conscious decision to carry the taser on her side next to her pistol (I don't have any indication that she did or not). I honestly believe she probably carried the taser on the other side but her hand just reacted like muscle memory because she has so much more training in drawing a pistol. I am not sure if this charge could be proven, but it is possible. BTW, this is the highest charge I could think of for Chauvin in the Floyd case and I am pretty sure it would not hold there either.

parabelum wrote: ↑Tue Apr 13, 2021 12:58 pmAfter 20+ years of police experience, how the heck do you confuse a taser (roughly 8oz) from a glock (roughly 32oz)? Not to mention they were on opposite sides and she had it pointed at him for a bit. Troubling, very troubling. His conduct notwithstanding, there is an issue here. A big issue.

There are two ways to confuse the pistol and Glock. The first and most obvious is that I do not know that she was carrying them on opposite sides. That is how I was trained, but not everyone does that and it was advanced thinking when I went through Taser training because they were still a relatively new thing back then. But I was also taught something that almost no one does, carry the Taser in a normal left handed draw, not just on the left side in a cross draw. It means the left hand gets used to drawing the Taser while the right hand still draws the pistol. It helps just a little more with keeping them apart (IMO).

The second part is that we know that under stress, people lose some functions, such as fine motor control, and various senses such as auditory exclusion. When I was in a shooting, the detectives did not believe I could draw the hammer on the revolver and let it back down safely to squeeze the trigger double action. What was going through my mind was contradictory training. From the time I was 8, my father had taught me to shoot the revolver single action for accuracy. Then the PD taught me to shoot it double action for combat style shooting. I drew it and cocked it out of 35 years of habit, then remembered saying to myself that they said to fire it double action so I lowered the hammer and then squeezed off a round - and cocked it again out of habit, lowering it again. The detective found the fired round was not under the hammer like he expected and did not believe my explanation. I also suffered auditory exclusion and time dilation so that I heard three distinct pops (not even as much as a 22 produces) as my partner and I fired, and it felt like a lot of time between them. The neighbor who called it in said it sounded like one long boom to him and he heard no pause between the shots. I know the sense of touch and the judgement of the weight are also going to go when the person is under stress like that.

I honestly believe she thought she had her taser out. I also honestly believe that either she carried the taser on her right side OR she was under enough stress that her hand went to her pistol instead of her taser because of too much training with pistols and little to no recurrent training with tasers. In danger she reacted instead of making a thinking and calculated action. In a fight, you react how you were trained normally. If she got recurrent training in pistols (at least once a year and probably more, but no recurrent training with tasers), her reaction is going to be to draw. One of the problems with officers being gun people is they go practice with their pistols for fun and relaxation. This is still training and it reinforced in her subconscious where the pistol was. I know there have been quite a few times where I needed a pistol and it was suddenly in my hand and I had no recollection of even reaching for it let alone drawing it.

I don't really think there is a lot of mystery in this shooting. They had a suspect with a warrant that fought with them and ran back to get in his car. I think he was trying to drive away but since the warrant was for carrying a gun (reportedly), it might have been an attempt to get a weapon. I think, because of the passenger, it was an attempt to get away but we don't know that either. To the best of my knowledge, the shooting was not legally justified (not under Texas law and I doubt if Minnesota's is much different) but it was also not a crime.

Her resignation was probably a good thing for her and the department, despite the comments about it being to get a new job as a cop in some other city. She might, but I bet her decision after this was to get out of police work. This kind of mistake weighs heavily on the soul of good or even mediocre cops.