New Orleans Cop Indicted for Killing an Unarmed Man During a Pot Raid

Last week a
grand jury
indicted a New Orleans police officer who killed an unarmed
20-year-old man during a pot raid last March. Officer Joshua
Colclough
shot Wendell Allen shortly after police burst into his home in
the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans while serving a search
warrant aimed at uncovering evidence of marijuana dealing. (They
found 4.5 ounces of pot, along with bags, digital scales, and a
handgun.) Colclough’s attorney, Pat Fanning, describes the
circumstances of the shooting this way:

When you serve a search warrant not knowing what’s behind that
door, you’re going in, you place yourself in harm’s way. That’s
what Officer Colclough did.

Then someone steps out on him and startles him and starts
raising his hand in his direction. He had to decide in a split
second, do I wait to decide if he has a gun in his hand and he
shoots me? Or can I assume if he steps out on me, that it was
reasonable to fear the guy had a gun and was going to shoot
him?

The grand jury evidently deemed it not so reasonable, charging
Colclough with manslaughter, defined
as a homicide “committed in sudden passion or heat of blood
immediately caused by provocation sufficient to deprive an average
person of his self-control and cool reflection.” That seems to
fit the facts of the case pretty well. The grand jury reportedly
rejected a charge of second-degree murder, which requires a
“a specific intent to kill or to inflict great bodily harm” and
triggers a mandatory life sentence. The indictment came a day
after Colclough failed to appear at a hearing where he was expected
to plead guilty to negligent homicide (defined
as “the killing of a human being by criminal
negligence”), which carries a maximum penalty of five years in
prison. Now Orleans Parish prosecutors are threatening to invoke a
provision
that requires a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years for
offenders who discharge firearms while committing certain violent
felonies, including manslaughter (which otherwise carries an
indeterminate sentence of up to 40 years). Not fair, says
Fanning:

Frankly, if they do that, that is an abuse of the statute. The
statute contemplates a criminal committing an intentional criminal
act and choosing to use a firearm, as opposed to a police officer
who not only carries a gun in the line of duty, but is required to
as a condition of his employment.

Since manslaughter is specifically listed as one of the crimes
that triggers a 20-year mandatory minimum when the offender uses a
gun, this does not seem like much of a stretch to me. It is surely
more reasonable than sending
a pot dealer to prison for 55 years because he “used” guns by
possessing them for self-defense.

Fanning’s plea for lenient treatment of cops who kill reminds me
of what Allen’s mother
said about Colclough after he shot her son:

His police title, that’s just a title. He’s still a man just
like the next man that commits a murder. So my child’s crime should
be treated the same if he’d gotten killed by a regular man.

Althoug Colclough’s indictment is encouraging (and, frankly,
surprising), a “regular man” who did what he did would be charged
with felony murder: killing someone, even accidentally, while
breaking into his home. Thus do the drug laws transform burglary
and assault into law enforcement by making peaceful transactions
into crimes. In this case, the cops had a warrant, they raided the
right location, and they seem to have done everything by the
book—except for accidentally killing someone who posed no threat to
them. Cops will always be fallible, but the war on drugs
unnecessarily multiplies the chances of fatal mistakes like this
one.

According to the Drug War Chronicle, which
alerted me to Colclough’s indictment, Allen’s death was the
15th related to domestic drug law enforcement in the U.S. this
year. We are now up to 43.

2012-08-23 15:16:39

Source: http://reason.com/blog/2012/08/23/new-orleans-cop-indicted-for-killing-an