He killed a man
by digby
It’s good to know that Oklahoma hasn’t completely gone over to the dark side.
Prosecutors on Monday charged the Tulsa County, Oklahoma reserve sheriff’s deputy who shot and killed an unarmed man earlier this month with second degree manslaughter.
The Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office has said that Robert Bates, who is 73 years old and is white, fatally shot Eric Harris, who was black, on April 2 when he mistook his handgun for a taser while trying to help take Harris into custody.
District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler said in a press release that Bates was charged with second-degree manslaughter for the shooting.
“Mr. Bates is charged with Second-Degree Manslaughter involving culpable negligence,” Kunzweiler said in the release, as quoted by The Tulsa World newspaper. “Oklahoma law defines culpable negligence as ‘the omission to do something which a reasonably careful person would do, or the lack of the usual ordinary care and caution in the performance of an act usually and ordinarily exercised by a person under similar circumstances and conditions.'”
This is the least they can do. It was also negligent of the department to have this armed amateur (who is also the chief’s favorite political donor) running around playing cop and they should be charged with something too. Their first comments were to just shrug and say “it was a mistake” and say nothing was going to be done about it at all. That police chief should be fired.
At least the legal system is applying the law in a way that makes some sense. People are charged with manslaughter in some jurisdictions for falling asleep at the wheel and killing someone in a car crash. (This elderly man was convicted of manslaughter when he accidentally stepped on the gas and killed 10 people at the Santa Monica market a few years back.)
Deadly mistakes do happen and I’m not in favor of long prison terms to punish them, particularly when the accused is elderly or young. But in this case, it was a deadly mistake by someone who was armed with all the weapons and authority of a police officer. That requires some special accountability.
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