12/06/2016
See earlier The Case Of Michael Slager: Not Just Lynching, A Crucifixion, and our complete roundup of Michael Slager coverage.
On Monday, December 5, 2016, the South Carolina jury trying white defendant Michael Slager in the April 4, 2014, North Charleston killing of black Walter Scott found itself hopelessly deadlocked, after four days of deliberation. Black Associate Judge Clifton Newman declared a mistrial, and white prosecutor Solicitor Scarlett Wilson vowed to retry and convict Slager, who is also due for an unconstitutional, triple-jeopardy, “civil rights” trial, at the feds’ hands. [ After hung jury is declared in Michael Slager trial, prosecutor vows: 'There will be another day', By Andrew Knapp, Post & Courier, December 6, 2016]
(Note that after each side had argued its case, the People threw the wild card of a second option of manslaughter onto the ante. I have no idea what effect that change had on the jury’s deliberations, or how the defense would have dealt with the charge, had it known in advance. The change was clearly intended to rescue a botched, political prosecution which had wildly overcharged the defendant.)
I never believed that Officer Slager was guilty of murder, based on the statute (“South Carolina law defines murder as the unlawful taking of life with malice”) [ Judge allows lesser charge of manslaughter in former South Carolina cop’s murder trial Chicago Tribune, November 30th,2016] the videos, and the legal opinion that a retired, 30-year lawman provided to VDARE.com:
At some point, the officer arrests Scott. He attempts to take him into custody and a fight ensues. But once the arrest decision is made and the officer makes physical contact with Scott, a seizure has occurred. The fact a seizure has legally occurred, once the officer tells Scott he is under arrest and makes physical contact, changes the entire nature of the shooting.The officer is not shooting a fleeing felon and the shooting is not a Garner seizure. [See below for discussion of Garner — NS] The seizure occurred already, and Scott is actually escaping from custody, which makes him a shoot-on-sight subject. Persons escaping from custody can be shot.
[A Law Enforcement Veteran Speaks in Defense of Michael Slager, VDARE.com, April 12, 2015.]
That means, specifically, they can be shot in the back. Prisoners who are escaping from custody rarely have the courtesy to turn around, and let the pursuing officer shoot them in the front.
The notion that an officer shooting a man in the back under such circumstances is “murder” is one of the many racial fairy tales that racial socialists have institutionalized.
The Conservative Treehouse’s analysis apparently showed that Scott had shot Officer Slager with his own Taser. Expert testimony was mixed this point.
The Post & Courier claims at the beginning of this 3:06 version, “The following contains unedited, graphic footage of the April 4, 2015, shooting of Walter Scott.” This version has only the shooting and the immediate aftermath. It doesn’t show Scott assaulting Officer Slager on the ground, or standing up.
Walter Scott shooting from The Post and Courier on Vimeo.
The following version, from ABC News Australia, is more complete.
The Slager trial must be seen in the context of a 50-year history during which America’s elites and non-white underclasses have together waged war on white policemen, by continuously committing crimes against cops, and moving the legal goalposts, in order to handcuff and railroad the police, and free and enrich black criminals and their families.
As I observed 20 years ago in Chronicles, when you handcuff the police, people die. [Letter From New York City, August 1996, PDF]
The people who wanted to see Slager convicted are responding in much the way they responded to the presidential election. They can’t imagine how their side lost. And make no mistake: The Michael Slager trial was every bit as political as the election.
The biggest difference between the election and the trial is that virtually no one is publicly expressing relief for Michael Slager.
Well, I am. But I said “virtually.”
The jury voted… we don’t know how the jury voted. Here are some of the “facts” the Main Stream Media have fed us — civilians and ink-stained kvetches like yours truly alike — since Friday:
The foregoing, different stories cannot all have been true, even at the times they were reported.
Or can they? Was there a 12 Angry Men scenario, with one doubter turning six or seven fellow jurors against the racially-motivated black foreman? Or did the foreman and judge’s misconduct do the trick?
Nevertheless, I do suspect some SJW journalists of lying about what was going on in the juror room, in order to manipulate the public, and the jurors themselves.
The CBS Evening News, in particular, anonymously tweeted that Judge Newman tried to toss the white holdout, then corrected the tweet, then deleted both tweets.
Maybe we need to polygraph fake news, er, MSM reporters. (A dose of truth serum and hypnosis wouldn’t hurt, either.)
I believe that the Michael Slager mistrial is not only an instance of the War on White Policemen, but also an instance of Fake News.
The court cases most relevant to the Slager trial are the 1984-1985 U.S. Supreme Court case, Tennessee v. Garner, and the 1991-1992 LAPD (Rodney King) and 2012-2013 George Zimmerman (Trayvon Martin) trials.
In 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Garner, that “an apparently unarmed, nondangerous fleeing suspect” (burglar), had a right to flee a police officer, without fear of being shot.
In a poorly-argued majority decision, the High Court asserted that a suspect who appeared to be unarmed posed no danger to the public. The Court ignored the fact that unarmed men beat people to death all the time, and that appearing to be unarmed is not the same as actually being unarmed.
Any policeman will tell you that there is no such thing as a “non-dangerous” burglar. New York philosopher Charles Frankel and Little Rock news anchor Anne Pressly would tell you that, but they were both murdered by burglars.
However, Garner also allowed for cops to shoot violent suspects:
Such force may not be used unless necessary to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others. Pp. 7-22.
In the Rodney King (1991-1992) and George Zimmerman (2012-2013) cases, the MSM doctored evidence to make the “white” eventual defendants (the police in the King case, and George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case), look guilty. (Heck, even I was sure the LAPD cops were guilty!)
Every day for at least one year, every evening news broadcast in America opened by replaying the doctored Rodney King tape. Media evil was every bit as much a factor in American life as it is now.
When the all-white, largely pro-cop Simi Valley jury saw the undoctored video, read the police reports, and heard the cops’ testimony as to King’s violent assaults on them, they acquitted all four officers, Sgt. Stacy Koon, and officers Laurence Powell, Theodore Briseno and Timothy Wind, on April 29, 1992.
Florida authorities sought to railroad George Zimmerman in a show trial, aided by a complicit judge and prosecutor, as well of course a biased MSM, but the predominantly white (and all-female) jury refused to play along and acquitted the defendant.
Finally, a word about the Scott family. Walter Scott’s parents have been depicted by Solicitor Wilson and the MSM as saintly pillars of the community. [Solicitor Wilson’s Statement Regarding Mistrial in the trial of Michael Slager [PDF], Office of the Solicitor, Ninth Judicial Circuit, December 5, 2016.]
But if I, as a white man, had raised a son who grew up to sire multiple bastards around the countryside, while refusing to support them, even when he earned $50,000 per year; to apparently be a car thief, or someone who bought a stolen car (Solicitor Wilson never responded to multiple calls from this reporter or defense counsel on this matter); whose cocaine addiction got him fired from jobs; and who got himself killed after repeatedly assaulting a policeman, and either using (or attempting to use) the officer’s Taser on him; I’d be considered the biggest loser of a father around.
And that’s what Walter Scott’s parents are.
None of the stories I read about the mistrial mentioned that the City of North Charleston immediately paid the Scotts a bounty of $6.5 million.
Some wags, who would never get published in the evil media, aptly called that “riot insurance.”
Why are the Scotts still hanging around and agitating for vengeance — not “justice” — against Michael Slager?
They already won the ghetto lottery.
Nicholas Stix is a New York City-based journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education. He spent much of the 1990s teaching college in New York and New Jersey. His work has appeared in Chronicles, The New York Post, Weekly Standard, Daily News, New York Newsday, American Renaissance, Academic Questions, Ideas on Liberty and many other publications. Stix was the project director and principal author of the NPI report, The State of White America-2007. He blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.
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