Not guilty

Philando Castile will not get justice it seems. Not through the courts anyway.

It appears that at this point nothing is enough evidence for a jury to convict an officer in a shooting. Maybe if the victim is white, but maybe not. That wasn't the case for Mr. Castile though.

There are a couple things making it hard to get a conviction in these cases, besides racism I mean, well not besides, because racism inextricably permeates the entire legal process, but practical things. The first is a pair of 1980 Supreme Court decisions that allow an officer to use deadly force when a reasonable officer on the scene could reasonably fear for their safety. That wording is pretty broad in a lot of ways, the defense doesn't have to show that the officer being charged was reasonable or in fear for their safety, only that a hypothetical reasonable officer who was there might have been, it's an important distinction and changes the person who committed the crime from a real person standing in court, to some metaphorical potential cop without a face who can be given every benefit of the doubt.

The other thing is jury selection, the jury in the Castile case included only two black jurors, and cases like this in the future will not likely include many black jurors themselves, see, defense attorneys love to eliminate anyone they think might be biased during jury selection, and in a racially charged shooting event, black people are obviously going to be biased and the way selection is set up means they don't have to allow many of them, if at all.

This wouldn't be a problem(much), except white people are terrible. Even those who claim to be allies are all too eager to show how unbiased and fair they can be, and we all know how white folks tend to assume the cops are perfectly reasonable people who should be obeyed without question at all times and their actions are always justifiable.

We are too good at equating "neutral" with "both sides have valid points", a man was killed when he didn't have to be, no one disputes that, and yet somehow that doesn't exactly matter because white folks can be convinced that it is possible to be scared for your life in that situation. Not that he was, or that he should have fired, just that it was possible. A truly neutral viewing of the evidence should have seen a cop shoot an innocent man with his girlfriend and child in the car multiple times for no reason at all.

Unsaid(in court), but heard all the same through all this of course is why the jurors decided he could have been reasonably in fear for his life, the victim was black. And black people are scary.

I am willing to bet no one said it like that, that no one even mentioned race during deliberations, not because they weren't thinking it, but because they didn't need to. They knew why they agreed with the cop, they knew why their fellow jurors agreed with the cop, it was an excuse that affected their thinking on an almost unconscious level, and it will always win out in these cases if the jury is white, or mostly white.

I know any of you reading this are likely white, and I hope that you all wouldn't have returned a not guilty verdict, I hope I wouldn't too, but you know what? I can't promise that, I can't absolutely say that if placed in a high pressure situation with my peers around me that I would be able to hold on to my convictions and push for what is right, not when it would be so easy to fall in line with the unspoken rules of prejudice. I like to think I would do the right thing though.

But you know, none of us are gonna be selected for that kind of thing, because remember, defense attorneys actively avoid people with education and convictions on topics related to the case. So we have to rely on middle aged, uneducated, uninformed, white people to do the right thing.

That works out pretty well usually right?