06/09/15 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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Hey listen, so on the line, I got our friend Will Grigg.
And Will Grigg, he writes a lot of great stuff, man.
And including this one, only blue lives really matter.
And blue, of course, being the cops.
He writes at freedominourtime.blogspot.com, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And you Google Will Grigg, he's the guy that's not the professional soccer player, he's the other guy.
And also he writes at lewrockwell.com as well, bookmark that thing, bookmark it here, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Only blue lives really matter, you say, huh?
Will, welcome to the show.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
Thank you so much, Scott.
Happy to have you here.
So, all right, now this is the story of Michael Brello, a cop who was actually charged and prosecuted for killing some unarmed black people, if that can possibly be believed in the first place.
But then he was acquitted, no big deal.
What happened here?
Mr. Brello is, as it happens, a Marine combat veteran of the Iraq War who became a correctional officer in the Cleveland area about 10 years ago, and in 2007, he joined the Cleveland Police Department.
And a couple of years ago, as has been well publicized, he got caught up in a lengthy car chase involving a couple, Timothy Russell and Melissa Williams, who were in a really old Chevy Malibu.
And this car chase began following a traffic stop that was aborted because the police officer who had made contact with them originally didn't really have any cause to detain them, and so they left.
And at some point after they left, their car backfired, and a Cleveland police officer think that that was a gunshot, sent out a general call that shots had been fired, and then the chase began.
And Russell and Williams apparently were in understandable fear for their lives, not knowing why the police were pursuing them.
And given what happened at the end of the police chase, it seems to me that there's at least some colorable understanding here that they had a legitimate reason to fear.
But after 22 minutes, they found themselves cornered in an intersection.
They were surrounded by 13 police officers who unleashed a 137-shot fusillade.
There are 13 of them firing, but apparently Mr. Braylo himself fired a couple of dozen rounds or more.
I'm not really sure exactly how many rounds he fired, but the last eight seconds of this barrage were carried out by Mr. Braylo, who had mounted the hood of this Malibu and was firing through the windshield at the two unarmed people, the driver and the passenger.
They had no place to go.
Their vehicle had been caught, trapped, immobilized.
They were not a threat to anybody, and proof positive of the fact that they were not a threat is the fact that Mr. Braylo jumped on top of the hood of this car, and his only purpose in doing so, we have to understand, was not to protect his fellow officers.
That's something, as a matter of fact, that the expert witness in this case testified, that that action did nothing to protect himself, obviously, or his fellow officers.
The reason why he was able to do this, proof positive that this wasn't a danger to him, is the fact that he jumped on the hood of the car, but the reason why he did this was to kill the passenger and the driver.
It was to kill the suspects.
It had nothing to do with protecting life, liberty, property, good order.
He jumped on the hood of that car for the specific and sole purpose of killing these two people.
He was charged originally with murder.
That was the original intent, shocking as it might seem, of the prosecutor in this case.
He was referred to a grand jury, which is an appropriate procedure.
The grand jury didn't want to charge him with murder.
They charged him with two counts of voluntary manslaughter.
Every element of that crime was proven in court.
That's something very important to recognize here.
This is a bench trial, not a jury trial.
Conventionally, police officers prefer bench trials to jury trials when they're actually brought up on criminal charges, I have found.
Judge John P. O'Donnell recognized that every element of that crime had been proven in terms of what, in an ordinary case, would be sufficient to bring about a conviction for voluntary manslaughter, but he equivocated regarding the specificity of the rounds that were fired by Braylo as being the rounds that killed the two victims, first of all.
Secondly, he took refuge in the expert testimony of Mr. Katsaris that although what Officer Braylo did was unconstitutional and unreasonable, it was still justifiable.
It was still a legitimate exercise of his discretion when it came to killing people.
The critique that Mr. Katsaris offered, and this is the part of the story that I found to be quite remarkable.
Mr. Katsaris, Ken Katsaris, is a former Leon County, Florida sheriff.
He was the one who read the indictment to Ted Bundy about 30 years ago.
Ted Bundy, of course, being a serial killer who didn't have the advantage of a state consecrated costume or discretionary function as a killer in the service of the state when he killed his victims.
Mr. Katsaris, as a sheriff rather, read the indictment to Ted Bundy, and then after retiring from that position, he became sort of a circuit writing evangelist on behalf of Qualified Immunity for Law Enforcement on behalf of a group, a shadowy group located in Chicago called Americans for Effective Law Enforcement.
But his testimony here was that the only objective consideration that governed the actions of Michael Braylo was the safety of himself and his comrades on the scene.
The safety of the suspects here, if you want to treat them as criminal suspects, they weren't listed for anything here apart from being involved in unsafe operation of a motor vehicle, which last I saw was not officially listed as a capital offense.
Their safety had nothing to do with the objective considerations of this case, according to Mr. Katsaris.
The only question was, are his actions compatible with the overriding prime directive imperative of officer safety?
And by exposing himself the way he did, if there was actual risk on the scene, he actually endangered his comrades by introducing into this scenario the element of risk that he might have been injured, and you have an officer down here who would, of course, be the central focus of attention on the part of the other officers on the scene.
That's the only thing that mattered, according to the expert witness here.
So the expert witness conferred his benediction on the act of killing these two unarmed and terrified people who did nothing wrong, while criticizing Officer Braylo for supposedly risking his own life and for risking the lives of his comrades by introducing this element here that might have resulted in an officer down scenario.
Now his assessment of the risks, Mr. Braylo's assessment of the risks, of course, was variable.
It tended to change depending upon the situation and the necessities, the legal necessities that he confronted.
His actions, of course, eloquently testified that these two people were not a threat.
But afterwards, in one of his debriefings, he tried to say that this was more intense than any of the firefights he'd allegedly been involved in in Iraq, which made sense when he recognized that there was a huge volume of lead filling the air, all of which was being directed at the victims, none of which, of course, was being directed by the victims at the assailants here.
But the essence of what was said in this court proceeding, and this is something that received the imprimatur of the trial judge, is that once the police decide to kill somebody, as long as they can do it safely, there's really no constitutional question that has to be addressed.
They have an executive function here that has to be respected.
Deference is due to the police when they decide that lethal force has to be used.
And if they do so in a way that is in compatibility with their standards and practices, if it's in harmony with their training, and if it's something that is, after the fact, consecrated by the invocation of the familiar doxology here that is uttered by police any time they kill somebody, always in fear for my life, I fear for the safety of the public and my comrades.
I did what was necessary in a split-second decision in order to carry out my function of protecting the public.
Any time you recite this standard formula, then that's sufficient, at least according to the judge, O'Donnell in this case, to justify what was done here, in spite of the fact that the only reason he did this was to kill people and not to protect anybody.
All right, and so it doesn't even, obviously it doesn't matter that they were wrong that it was a gunshot when it was a backfire, it doesn't matter that the so-called gunshot happened at the beginning of the chase, not the end of it, or any of these questions.
Well, I got a million more follow-up questions.
I got Will Grigg on the line.
We're talking about cops getting away with murder, like always.
He writes at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Pro libertate.
We'll be right back in a second.
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All right, kids, welcome back.
Man, oh, man.
So there are these two human beings that got massacred by the cops right off the face of the earth.
Unbelievable.
137-round onslaught took their lives, and then the one cop that was charged was only charged because when the whole thing was over and the rest of the cops all stopped killing these people, this guy ran, jumped up on the hood, and shot him 15 more times.
And the prosecutor decided that, geez, I don't know, but that might be over the line, dude.
We're going to see if the grand jury says so.
So he went on trial for manslaughter only, and then the judge let him off.
Now, I got all kind of follow-up questions here, and believe me, you can correct me if I just summarize that incorrectly in any way.
Feel free.
I'll give you plenty of time.
That's my best understanding.
But I wanted to go all the way back to how this thing started in the first place, actual facts of the case, because I believe that I read in a Credible News report that some of the officers knew that the guys, maybe the original cops that had pulled them over, or some who had been nearby at the time and witnessed it or something like that, they knew that the car was backfiring.
They saw it backfire in a visible way to correlate with the sound once or twice before the one coward cried out, shots fired.
Is that correct?
You got to explain about the 22-minute high-speed pursuit, because that sounds to me 22 minutes like it might be long enough to cross city and county lines into jurisdictions where these pigs had no jurisdiction whatsoever, no right whatsoever.
They did cross out of the jurisdiction, and this is considered to be something covered by what's called the hot pursuit principle.
And that's true also about some, at least, of the cops knew that the car was backfiring?
I have seen reports that suggest that's the case, but certainly within the space of 22 minutes, they should have been able to find out what's going on.
In justifying acts of this kind by police, and they're probably more common than most people would assume, there is a doctrine that has been devised by police apologists called contagious gunfire.
What happens is that these people are supposedly trained and disciplined and invested with the ability to assess a situation, take reasonable action in dealing with it, succumb to their reptilian brain impulses once they hear gunshots.
And so they're reduced to a puddle of privileged panic when they hear the report of something that sounds like a gunshot.
And as soon as a member of the blue tribe sends up the human cry that there is a threat to him or to others, then all of the considerations are summarily dismissed, and all that matters is to surround and destroy the target.
And this is not the way the peace officers would behave, but that's the way that police officers have been trained now for more than a generation.
And you're right, Scott, when you're dealing here with a situation that takes 22 minutes, you're going to be involving multiple jurisdictions.
And presumably, if these people are professional and rational and disciplined, they're going to be able to isolate and then deal with the threat, neutralize the threat, without summarily executing two people after they had been stopped and after the threat had been dealt with.
They were no longer a threat when this barrage began, and they are certainly no longer a threat at the time that Braylo gave expression to whatever action hero fantasy he entertains of himself by jumping on top of the hood of his car and directing gunfire down through the windshield.
And the DA, I guess, had already ceded that point by not charging any of the rest of them.
I mean, obviously, once you get the car pulled over, feel free to surround them and execute them.
Shoot them as many times as you like.
And so the DA has no, can't even bring that up, basically, against the one guy.
Don't remove all subtlety about what's going on here by actually doing something so theatrical as to make it unambiguous what was going on.
I think that's the reason why Braylo was singled out.
Another thing that happened, of course, is that you had over half a dozen police officers refuse to cooperate with the investigation.
And most of them invoke their rights under the Fifth Amendment, which as citizens, they're entirely permitted and entitled, and I would say encouraged to do.
But the point is, if they're investigating a homicide, they wouldn't do that.
If they had treated this as a homicide rather than as an assault on law enforcement, which is how incidents of that kind generically are treated, then they would have cooperated with the prosecutor.
But this is an instance, once again, where blue privilege defines the behavior of people who are supposedly involved in the protection of the public, which of course they are not.
Right.
But now, so I'm trying to understand the way this court case came together.
It must be fun trying to be a prosecutor whose only job is protecting other government employees in any crime they might commit, where they're in this weird position now.
So it sounds to me like the way you're describing it is, the question of whether this cop might have committed manslaughter hinged on whether he put the other officers in danger, not basically because the question of whether he had the authority even to jump up on the hood and shoot had already kind of been pushed to the side, as you're saying, that it was the expert witness.
And I guess the judge concluded that he hadn't put the other officers in too much undue danger to be convicted of the manslaughter of the two innocent civilians in the car?
No.
My understanding is that Katsaris testified on behalf of the prosecution as an expert witness.
So that's something that suggests to me that the prosecution, to that extent, was interested in throwing the case.
The way that the constitutional issue shook out is that the actions that Braylon Winter took after the onslaught began were what we're being focused on here.
And the judge here was trying to say that because you could not definitively show that any of the shots that he fired, which would have been lethal in and of themselves, were in fact the killing shots, that created sufficient ambiguity to justify, at least in his mind, dismissing the voluntary manslaughter case.
The thing that I find really interesting about the subject of the authority to conduct the exercise of lethal force here is that if you take a look at the most recent Supreme Court case dealing with this, which is the Sheehan case out of San Francisco involving a mentally troubled person who had an edged weapon and was killed by San Francisco police officers, that actually focused more on the Americans with Disabilities Act and whether some kind of an accommodation had to be made for this mentally handicapped person here, rather than on the subject of qualified immunity.
But as far as I can tell, reading the amicus briefs that were filed in that case and the various opinions that were filed, police officers, and I'm quoting now from one of the amicus briefs, police officers, in addition to receiving qualified immunity, are entitled to wide discretion in making an arrest.
Deference is a key part of the court's immunity jurisprudence.
By allowing some margin of error, the court avoids a chilling effect on law enforcement.
That amicus brief, I think, was influential here in the court's decision, which essentially upheld qualified immunity in that case.
And that was the first time, right, that the U.S. Supreme Court had agreed with lower courts who invented this concept in the first place that such a thing exists.
Am I wrong?
Well, no.
If you go back to 1974, the Scheuer case, which dealt with the subject of qualified immunity, sort of laid the groundwork for it.
Oh, it was a Supreme Court decision that created it in the first place, and now this second one is just reconfirming.
It's just reconfirming it and refining it because the original case from over 40 years ago, interestingly enough, dealt with the Kent State Massacre.
And it was qualified immunity as applied to the policy makers who deployed the National Guard troops that killed four people and wounded, what was it, 19 others in this incident during a campus protest in 1970.
So you have qualified immunity emerging, if you take a look at its ancestry, from a case that involved the military killing unarmed protesters during the Vietnam War, and now it's being refined and weaponized for the benefit of the police who are actually an occupation army here in what remains the United States in 2015.
Well, there you go.
If they can get away with that, they can sure as hell get away with anything else, too.
Exactly.
Now, I want to go back to one more minor point here, and so I'll be keeping you in the break here for just a sec, but it seems an important point that you're saying that the judge decided, well, you know, and I think you do say in here that they say, you know, they traced this particular cop's bullets to the bodies and possibly lethal shots, but they were shot so many times by so many different cops, that was enough reasonable doubt for whether this cop's bullets actually killed the people.
And now it seemed like you could just put the shoe on the other foot right there, where if a whole bunch of people shot a cop to death, would they say that, well, we can't prove that any particular shot came from any particular gun and actually killed the guy, and so you're all not guilty and free to go?
Or they would just try them all together and say, well, whatever, even if suspect C missed every shot that he took, he was still engaging in the same, you know, attack, armed attack on the cop and would try them and convict them of murder just the same as the rest.
He would have been part of a conspiracy to commit murder, he would have been covered by joint and several liability for that criminal act, and what you're describing, Scott, is not a hypothetical.
There were 170 men being held in prison, jail right now, pretrial detention in Waco, who were accused of being involved in a murder, in spite of the fact that nobody can tell what happened at the Twin Peaks restaurant at this biker gathering in terms of who was responsible for the shots that actually killed nine people, most of whom, if not all of whom, were probably killed by the police.
But by virtue of propinquity, because they were there at the scene of the crime and because none of them was willing to waive his rights and talk to the police and the prosecutors, they're all essentially being charged under a conspiracy statute as if they're jointly responsible and severally responsible for murder because they happened to be in the area at the time.
Now that's a really interesting contrast with what happened in Cleveland here, where these people were flinging lead.
One of them, of course, was on top of the hood flinging lead through the windshield, and yet supposedly, because we cannot confirm that his specific shots specifically killed those individual victims, there's enough reasonable doubt we're asked to pretend regarding the charge of voluntary manslaughter here.
This is another example of blue privilege and the principle here that where police are involved in a lethal force incident, their lives are the only ones that matter in terms of what we're told to pretend the law says about the subject.
Man, and you know, just to look at the pictures of this car, this is just unbelievable.
This is one of those cases.
I hope people will really go to your blog and read up on this story.
You know what, Timothy Russell and Melissa Williams, whoever they used to be, they deserve that much, you know, for people to be interested in their story and to, you know, take whatever lesson from it, something.
It ought to matter to somebody that this is what happened and this is how their lives were taken from them.
It's madness.
I mean, if this was happening anywhere else, our State Department would be citing it as a reason to invade.
That's exactly right.
Absolutely crazy.
All right, Will, you are a hell of a great journalist.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you so much, Scott.
You take care.
All right, so that's the great Will Grigg.
Check him out at freedominourtime.blogspot.com and help support right there in the right-hand margin and down at the bottom of each article you can find a button to donate.
Hey, whatever you can do, man, a little bit, monthly donation of a little bit or a lot or whatever, you know, help support Will Grigg.
This is great journalism, great libertarian journalism here, independent journalism being done.
Will Grigg at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
We'll be right back.
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