A Black Texas man who aspired to become a police officer spent 16 months fighting felony accusations that he assaulted two officers during a “welfare check” at his home. A jury acquitted him after his son recorded video of the arrest.
The video caught Huntsville police and prosecutors by surprise, Stewart said, because they had expected to secure a conviction based on the officers’ accounts.
The cops accused Stewart of spitting in one of their faces and shoving the other officer, but none of that is captured on video.
“I don’t like to call people liars,” Stewart told ABC 13 Houston after his acquittal.
“But fabrication, yes. Cover up, yes.”
Police testimony should never be admissible as evidence without bodycam footage to back it up, not these days.
I was kicked off a jury for saying that.
The judge asked us all if we can all agree that the words of the cops was considered valid evidence.
I said no, because cops are human and infallible like all of us, and they can lie.
Judge got so mad and I wasn’t part of jury after that.
Nitpick: “infallible” means not capable of failing.
Also, judges and cops often times work together very closely, which is a practice that needs to stop.
judges and cops often times work together very closely, which is a practice that needs to stop
cop - prosecutor interdependance is also a problem.
we had jury duty last sept, and they asked the potential juror pools, most got kicked off one reason or another. of course the prosecutor/defense attorney tried to sus out if people are doing it to quickly ge of jury duty as well. some courts will drag this on if they can.
fallible
flammable
ALL cop testimony is fabricated.
Next time stay quiet
Unless you’re trying to get out of it, don’t admit that next time. Don’t even consider it a lie. There’s probably some situation, like if it’s backed up with video, where you’d consider trusting it some. But you admitting that ensures everyone there does take their word as the truth. It makes the issue more pervasive. There’s a chance that you staying quite could have changed the outcome, and you could have talked to the other jurors about how often cops lie.
Yup. Require them to wear body cams at all times. If anything is taken to court and “malfunction” "broken “corrupted data” is ever an issue then their testimony is immediately thrown out.
I guarantee you will start seeing 100% uptime on those body cams after that.
Also yes, always record cops
“To beat charges…”? You mean, prove his innocence?
Innocent until proven guilty comes with a skin color and bank account requirement.
Don’t forget praying to the correct made up person that controls the universe.
Nah, plenty of brown and poor people pray to the same god.
All three are required.
Most of the world prays to the same god - they’re all just equally dumb in their interpretation of it.
In a sane world, every case revolving around those officers testimony would be thrown out.
In a really sane world they’d be arrested for attempted false imprisonment
It boggles the mind that police officers are not held to the same standard they hold others to.
In the US that comes down to Harlow v Fitzgerald, ç 1982. The crux of the case is §1983. Should have been fairly straightforward, as when 1983 was written and passed by Congress, in 1881 it stripped all legal immunity from all civil servants. In 1884 an unnamed secretary took it upon themselves to remove a 16 word clause that, by said removal, reversed the intent of the law. This occured when said secretary was given the task of directly copying The Congressional Record, word for word, in 1884. The SCOTUS of 1982 was handed the illegally amended wording, though they probably didn’t know that, given the wording of both the majority and dissenting opinions.
I mean, I’m going for the most insane of sane world to keep my expectations low.
they’d be arrested
By whom?
Every police officer should have to wear a body cam at all times while on duty. That body camera should have a bright outward pointing light on it and other means of clearly indicating it’s recording.
It should also be legal to kill any on-duty police officer that turns their camera off. See a cop without their camera on? Perfectly legal to pull out a gun and drop the pig.
Police testimony should not be allowed. The body cam is their only voice. If they turn it off, then they have no testimony, so without it, you better have some other evidence, or the guy is going free.
At this point I will never believe a single cop’s word.
There are times it’s reasonable for an officer to turn their camera off. E.g. some people might be willing to share information, but not go to court over it. Turning off their camera to get information unofficially then makes sense.
That said, a malfunctioning body camera should be seen in the same light as destruction of evidence. It is assumed to be the worst case, unless proven otherwise, or reasonably explained.
FYI, apparently a lot of UK police love the body cams. It makes their paperwork so much easier. It’s also apparently quite satisfying to watch a hungover idiot realise exactly how rude they were to the officer trying to defuse things outside a pub.
officer testimony should be inadmissable. they should be required to just use body camera. its on them to have them always going.
Guilty until proven innocent seems to be increasingly common…
Police testimony consistently gets the benefit of the doubt among plebs who don’t understand that these people are constantly lying.
I know I wouldn’t consider a witness to be overly reliable without supporting evidence.
Veteran DAs are very good at lining up exhibits and experts that get admitted as evidence.
Civilians who think they can simply outwit the system will routinely step right in the first trap, because they don’t even know the rules of the game they’re playing. It wasn’t just the son’s video that saved him. This guy must have had an amazing lawyer and an abundance of good sense. How many hours did he sit in an interrogation room without talking? How many jail-house snitches and journalist phone calls did he no-sell? How much physical, psychological, and financial abuse did he endure? The article doesn’t say.
Increasing more exposed to have already been common.
Reading comprehension. It says right there in the headline that he is black.
I know you’re being sarcastic, but this is the internet, and some twats don’t always understand that concept, so I’d advise a “/s” at the end of comments like that.
And be deprived of the entertainment generated by Poe’s Law? Never!
“I told them, ‘I do not give you consent to come in my house’ but I guess the word consent triggered the officer because they pushed past me and started grabbing on me,” Stewart said.
Edit: just felt this line needed to be highlighted.
A jury acquitted him after his son recorded video of the arrest.
Causality seems messed up here.
Shouldn’t this read “A jury acquitted him after seeing his son’s recorded video of the arrest.” or some such?It describes a technically accurate sequence of events: His son recorded the video, and some time after that the jury acquitted him. But yeah, the wording weirdly seems to imply the son did the recording because the jury wasn’t yet convinced, and only then did they decide to acquit. Your phrasing is way better.
Prediction: The police will get in no trouble whatsoever for provably committing perjury.
Perjury? What are they Democrats?
If the pigs are just gonna turn off their body cameras, we all should be recording everything those fascist fucks do. We need our own body cams.
If body camera footage doesn’t exist, then there is no crime, and the person goes free, no matter what the cops testify to.
Cop testimony is ALWAYS fabricated, and should not be allowed as evidence. The body camera is their only voice. If it doesn’t exist, there is no evidence.
Or a small swarm of recording drones.
i dont mind calling them liars, theyre murderous psychopaths
There is no way is ever vote guilty if I was on a jury based solely on police testimony. I feel like there’s should be an every evolving standard packet of police lying in reports and in court that every defense lawyer submits as evidence that police testimony is not reliable on its own.
If I were on a jury I would 1000% consider police testimony as biased and unreliable.
Sadly, I probably won’t ever get picked for jury duty, because I know what jury nullification is, and I will absolutely tell my fellow potential jurors all about it.
I once went through selection for a trial and told the prosecutor that I did not accept testimony alone as valid evidence as there has been shown to be far too many issues with it over the years.
I was dismissed before the woman sitting next to me whose answer to the question about relationships to law enforcement started with her husband being a judge, her kids were both cops, and she herself was homeland security.
You don’t have to outright tell them, but you can strongly hint at it, and not use the words “jurry nullification”.
We have been living in fascism for a long time and it requires people to get smart and keep their mouths shut to beat it.
If a cop says the sky is blue there’s a hell of a sunset going on outside.
I hope he doesn’t want to be a cop anymore. I doubt any department would take him after Googling his name.
My youngest brother was a guard at a county jail 20 years ago. Those sneaky pigs can turn cameras on and off at the press of a button. They can turn it off, antagonize a prisoner by calling them a slur, then turn it back on making it look like a random attack. Fuck the goddamned pigs.
Hang the cops by the balls
Porcine centipede them and make them hunt each others families or be castrated segment by segment.
Then do it anyway.
