Mar 11, 2021
Response To A Leftist Lawyer
I just read an article by a man claiming to be a lawyer critical of Amy Coney Barrett. I tend to listen to Right-leaning sources because I usually find they have better arguments, but I try to challenge myself, and I figured a lawyer on the Left would be tough to argue with. I was amazed at how bad his arguments were.
The article can be found here: I argued a shooting death case in front of Amy Coney Barrett, by Dan Canon.
I was surprised to find that this article had virtually no substance to it. The author starts off with a socio-political rant that has nothing to do with the particular case that he focuses on. This was then followed by him explaining that he was the lawyer for a family whose son was shot by police officers. This was after the son allegedly came after the police officers with a knife during an episode of mental illness.
So allegedly, an individual came after police with a knife, and they shot him — makes sense to me.
According to the author/lawyer, there were minor discrepancies between the accounts of the two police officers. e.g. One officer claimed that the suspect had a knife in his right hand, while the other officer claimed it was the left. But anyone familiar with the legal process knows that eyewitnesses often have minor discrepancies in their accounts (blue shirt vs red shirt etc.). So a minor discrepancy like this is not unusual.
As the article states:
Brad wasn’t able to tell his side of the story. But the story told by the cops didn’t add up. The knife they supposedly recovered had no fingerprints on it. One deputy said the knife was in his right hand; the other said it was his left hand. The knife was recovered from Brad’s left side, but he was right-handed. And even though Brad was supposedly charging directly at one of the deputies, the bullet entered his shoulder and traveled left to right through his body.
Here is one possible scenario: If a man is charging at one police officer, and his shoulders and chest are swaying in the normal fashion or if one arm is extended, then a second police officer standing a few feet away shooting at the man with the knife might very well shoot the man at this angle.
This is basic trigonometry.
Not to mention the fact that a right-handed man might hold the knife in his left, especially during an alleged episode of violent mental illness like this.
(Obvious solution: Someone who, through no fault of his own, is violent due to mental illness ought to be in some kind of institutional facility where he is cared for.)
The lawyer then goes on to explain that he is “unmoved” by Barrett… As if him being “moved” by her was some sort of standard we were supposed to adhere to. And he says the following:
I’m unmoved because I’ve seen so little compassion for grieving parents like Matt and Gina throughout my career, from any federal judge, let alone the Federalist Society drones who have lately taken over the judiciary. The basic inability to do what’s right for families like the Kings should be disqualifying. Not just for Amy Coney Barrett, but for the whole lot of ‘em.
As his own article makes clear, there wasn’t enough evidence to convict the police in this case of any wrongdoing. What this lawyer had was very minor circumstantial evidence, along with a great deal of emotional wordiness. (Go read the article for yourself, it is high on emotion and low on fact.)
We live in a society in which our rule of law states that a man is innocent until proven guilty. Being “moved” by a case or having compassion for individuals affected by a situation is not the standard by which we lock human beings in prison cells.
Justice is supposed to be “blind” in the sense that it is impartial and not moved by feeling sorry for one person or another in a way that would affect how we weigh the evidence. In order to find men guilty of an alleged crime, one must actually prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt with facts and evidence, not by compassion or feelings, nor by feeling sorry for those who lost a loved one, no matter how tragic that loss may have been.
Our judges are not in the seat of God, who can see all, and who knows all.
Our judges are human, and a good human judge can only make his judgment based on the facts and logic in each case. To make a judgment based on “compassion” instead of on the facts would make for an incredibly evil judge indeed.
May we pray to the ultimate Judge that such a day as that never comes to America.
