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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can't wait for the Capitol Police bootlickers to come in here and celebrate.[/quote]

I'm probably someone you'd call that.  But I don't think he should have been pardoned. He clearly violated departmental policy. It wasn't a fuzzy line. It wasn't nuanced. He violated policy.

I don't know DC criminal law well enough to comment on whether the criminal charges are appropriate. In Maryland, I'd think something like involuntary manslaughter would be appropriate.

Cops need to be given room to be human, which includes making mistakes. But that doesn't mean they get to intentionally violate their own departmental policies.

I will add, when someone so egregiously disregards policy like that, it likely is a symptom of a larger problem with supervision and accountability in general. If cops know they can skirt certain rules, many more cops will feel free to do the same. [/quote]

[b]Policy violations don't automatically equate to crimes. [/b] They are instances of breaking internal rules, and internal discipline at some level may be appropriate.  To criminally charge LEOs when a criminal ends up killed or injured as the result of their own criminal activity and bad judgment is ludicrous.  If the kid hadn't been breaking the law, if he had stopped when told to, he'd be alive today.  He didn't, but his death is somehting he brought upon himself; he had no idea what the police rules on vehicle pursuits were, and they matter only insofar as they were a violation of internal (and ill-advised, because they give criminals a free pass to run) policy.  Criminally sanctioning the officers under such circumstances is way disproportionate to the circumstances.  Had they done what they did, but the kid was eventually captured unharmed, would they have been charged criminally?  not a chance.  The criminal's own conduct is the distinguishing factor, not the actions of the officers.  [/quote]

They should when someone dies as a direct result. He contributed to the victim's actions by chasing him. There is a power imbalance there that heightens his responsibility.

Our criminal justice system is built on the premise that people are innocent until proven guilty.  It is meant to err on the side of allowing guilty people to go free rather than to imprison innocent people.  It is very imperfect and history has shown grave abuses of this premise.  The victim wasn't pursued because of a serious crime.  That might be different.  But he was pursued because he wasn't wearing a helmet.

Additionally, both Sutton and the supervising officer were accused of covering up the incident.  Innocent people don't do that.  That's not the type of cop who deserves mercy.

“As Mr. Hylton-Brown lay unconscious in the street in a pool of his own blood, Sutton and Zabavsky, agreed to cover up what Sutton had done to prevent any further investigation of the incident,” prosecutors said in a statement in September.

The officers allowed the driver whose car struck Hylton-Brown to leave the scene within 20 minutes of the crash, then turned off their body-worn cameras, conferred privately and left, prosecutors said.

Sutton drove his police car directly over the crash site, audibly crushing pieces of debris from the collision as he left, prosecutors said, and neither officer contacted the department’s Major Crash Unit or its Internal Affairs Division to each initiate investigations.

They also misled their commanding officer about the severity of the crash, denying that a police chase had even occurred and omitting any mention of Hylton-Brown’s critical injuries, prosecutors said. According to prosecutors, Zabavsky also falsely implied that Hylton-Brown had been drunk and Sutton drafted a false police report."

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-pardons-two-dc-officers-convicted-fatal-chase-20-year-old-man-co-rcna188920
[/quote]

The plain fact is the kid caused his own death.  Had he obeyed the law and the officers, he'd be alive today.  There is no getting around that, and blaming police for the outcome is obscene.  [/quote]

There us also not going around that had officer Sutton followed the rules of the department and had not obstructed justice by trying to cover up, the kid maybe  would have died anyway given how he was driving  but officer Sutton would not have been tried and convicted. See? Works both ways. Dont break the law snd you will be fine [/quote]

The question is proportionality, not whether rules were broken.  Breaking rules does not justify a murder conviction.  That's a gross miscarriage of justice, meriting pardon by anyone not blinded by progressive blinders as to what justice actually is.  [/quote]

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