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Comment by mortehu | Hacker News Reader

If you are resisting arrest, you may still be presumed innocent of the original crime. However you're almost certainly guilty of resisting lawful arrest, which is usually a misdemeanor.

There's no exemption that allows innocent people to resist lawful arrest.

This is not to say that injection sounds like a great solution for everyday arrests.

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Elijah McClain did not resist arrest.

> I can’t breathe. I have my ID right here. My name is Elijah McClain. That’s my house. I was just going home. I’m an introvert. I’m just different. That’s all. I’m so sorry. I have no gun. I don’t do that stuff. I don’t do any fighting. Why are you attacking me? I don’t even kill flies! I don’t eat meat! But I don’t judge people, I don’t judge people who do eat meat. Forgive me. All I was trying to do was become better. I will do it. I will do anything. Sacrifice my identity, I’ll do it. You all are phenomenal. You are beautiful and I love you. Try to forgive me. I’m a mood Gemini. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Ow, that really hurt. You are all very strong. Teamwork makes the dream work. Oh, I’m sorry I wasn’t trying to do that. I just can’t breathe correctly.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elijah-mcclains-last-words...

The source you're citing doesn't even address the assertion you're making, so that's a bit misleading to post. Looking for a source for your claim I found this, which adds some detail: https://youtu.be/lfzJzAm-OV0?t=63

In america if the police are killing you, resisting that death is a crime. If someone had attempted to stop the police from killing George Floyd, they would have been arrested and charged.

You can imagine the confusion that arises when plain clothes police seize people.

In most countries you can get off the hook for pretty much anything if you had a good reason to fear for your life.

In some countries it's even enough that a police officer is acting (obviously) unlawfully, giving you the right to resist.[1]

[1]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__32.html

In my country (Canada), using firearms for self-defence is almost universally regarded as illegal. However, when police officers exerted a no-knock warrant on the wrong person, and they defended themselves using firearms, they were found illegal, because it was judged that armed intruders violently barging through and threatening you in your home is one of the rare cases where the situation is so outrageous that it is justified. In the US, despite owning guns for self-defence being legal, you will be found guilty of murder for this, and certainly be found guilty of resisting arrest.

Generally this is the case, very often because either dead men tell no tales or the victim was a minority (see Breonna Taylor) . A while back though in TX there was a case where cops executed a no knock raid beginning with a flash bang and the homeowner shot 3 of them. The homeowner was not the target of the raid. He was found not guilty of attempted murder. I am sure the court fees and lost job destroyed his life though. Mug shot also appears to show he was very much roughed up in the process.

There are many instances of people using weapons in self defense and then police arrive and kill the gun owner. For instance; Jemel_Roberson' a black armed security guard that subdued a shooter in a bar. Cop showed up and immediately killed the security guard then lied that he was given multiple commands to drop the weapon. Witnesses said the cop arrived and shot the guard within 5 seconds. Later police changed their story and said it was just a case of friendly fire, very sad nothing can be done. And nothing was done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jemel_Roberson

> There's no exemption that allows innocent people to resist lawful arrest.

It's a bit murkier than that in the US. In some states you can't even resist unlawful arrest, but in all states you're allowed to defend yourself against _excessive_ force.

In practice that's probably a bad idea, but if you survive the retaliation from somebody who's armed and who has already proven themselves prone to excessive use of force then you might win the ensuing court case.

It says that on the books that you’re allowed to defend against excessive force, but they’ll still charge you for assault for bleeding on their uniform. (And then only retract this when the media outcry becomes too difficult to ignore.)

Being charged is not the same as being found guilty. Cops are not lawyers or judges.

Being charged is enough to hold you for 3 days, as well as to put you on probation for a couple months afterwards, even if the charges are dropped. This happened to a friend of mine when he was frustrated with an inland border control roadblock and didn't want to answer the questioning officer. He did not resist, was not violent in any way. He simply politely declined to answer.

In the end it cost him over a grand to get his car back and to pay for drug tests required by the probation. Again, he was never actually charged with anything.

Policing in this nation is fundamentally broken. The bad cops know how to use the system to brutalize people without consequences, and the rest of the police close ranks and protect them while they do it.

In addition, for most people, if you miss work for 3 days without an explanation, you'll be fired. If you miss work for 3 days and tell your boss it was because you were arrested, you'll also likely be fired. You'll now also have to answer "YES" on job applications where they ask you whether you've been arrested for anything (even if eventually charges were dropped or you were found not guilty). As an innocent person, the mere brush with law enforcement can have long-standing negative effects on your life.

Yes, fantastic point. My friend was fortunate to own his own business, but he did miss some scheduled stuff and had to explain it to his customers.

If it's just your word against theirs, they might as well be. Everybody is against you except for your low-paid advocate (the public defender) who's working on 100 cases at the same time as they're working on yours. It's different for the wealthy.

Cops are not lawyers or judges, but cops can make your life hell totally legally. There are people who are forced to sign away their right to protest in order to be let out of jail for a charge that is totally dropped.

> If you are resisting arrest

Alas, when someone is or is not "resisting arrest" is not something that is particularly well-defined. It's usually "when the officer says you are resisting," regardless of the actual facts at hand.

My point, basically, is that if a cop grabs you unexpectedly, and you push them away (a reasonable, normal reaction): the next thing you hear is "stop resisting!"

The crime of "resisting arrest" needs to go away.

Interesting reading: https://bostonreview.net/race-law-justice/lisa-cacho-jodi-me...

Of course, the definition of "lawful arrest" is pretty flexible these days and can seemingly include arrests that are blatantly unlawful, like some cops deciding to assault a random passerby on the street because they don't like the look of them or are unhappy about legal conduct like photography. Is it okay to resist under those circumstances? According to a judge or a police officer, probably not, but at the end of the day you'd probably win the case. If you survive.

> According to a judge or a police officer, probably not

I'd naively hope that a judge wouldn't side with a police officer here, but I think the fact that resisting arrest is inherently criminal is a pretty big flaw in the US legal system.

I live in a jurisdiction [1] where resisting arrest is not criminalised in the same sense as the US, and the idea that a police officer could unlawfully arrest you and then immediately have lawful grounds if you resisted is very alien to me.

[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resisting_arrest#England_and_W...

Since the '70s it feels like law enforcement (and juries to some extent) are informed by two movies much more than the Constitution and case law: Dirty Harry and Death Wish.

I saw a interesting clip on TV a while back where they played several clips of various popular police dramas in which the main characters use wildly illegal or unconstitutional tricks to get confessions from criminals. Things like physically assaulting them while contained and. turning off cameras in interrogation rooms to do so. The point it was trying to make was that this "desensitized" people to police violence. Of course, the criminals in the clips were things like child predators, serial killers, etc. so it was all justified.

https://youtu.be/MF--2o71w44

This is a pretty good video analysing law enforcement and how it got to become the way it is through the analysis of Dirty Harry.

Interesting presentation

Thankfully we don't use "almost certainly guilty" as the criminal standard in the US. So, you're still injecting an innocent person with drugs to detain them.

I don't love the government-owns-your-body aspect to this.

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