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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

What crime was she "about to commit" then which she needed to be detained to prevent? Sketch for me the indictment you're imagining for which she got executed. You're doing hyper-specific hair splitting elsewhere in this thread, surely you'd like the opportunity here.

The ability of people on the right to throw all their principles about limited government and checks and balances and constitutional restraint out the window the second the person who got shot in their face is a political enemy is just amazing to me. You people are the ones who think we all need guns all the time to PREVENT this kind of thing, I thought!

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> What crime was she "about to commit" then which she needed to be detained to prevent? Sketch for me the indictment you're imagining for which she got executed. You're doing hyper-specific hair splitting elsewhere in this thread, surely you'd like the opportunity here.

That’s up to the agents to articulate and the investigators, prosecutors, judges, and juries to evaluate.

The fact is that law enforcement are able to legally detain people under certain conditions and those conditions do not need to be adjudicated in the moment of detainment. It can come later, and the LEOs can be held responsible if they violated someone’s rights. People on here commenting otherwise either misunderstand the law, or are intentionally providing misinformation to manipulate people and create outrage.

> That’s up to the agents to articulate and the investigators, prosecutors, judges, and juries to evaluate.

Which will never happen, because the suspect is a faceless (literally) body in a morgue. You're just dodging. Because, and be honest with yourself: you want this to have happened. You want your enemies to be afraid of the (again, literal) secret police wandering the streets in pursuit of your personal political goals. And if the price for that is a few unconstitutional executions, you're willing to pay it and excuse it on the internet.

But you don't really believe this was legitimate law enforcement behavior. No one does. Real civil societies don't accept summary executions of probably-asshole probably-protesters who probably-obstruct visa check operations.

You are ascribing a hell of a lot of motivation to me just for stating common and frankly well known facts about whether or not LEOs can detain people.

If you don’t like the way the law works, do something to change it, don’t just pontificate on the internet because you are upset.

I ask again: what crime do you think she was being detained to prevent? I'm inferring your motivation from your refusal to engage on the subject you claim to be debating.

ICE has had a press conference and explained why their agents approached the car and wanted to detain that driver. They are claiming obstruction of their operations (18 U.S.C. § 111). It doesn’t matter what I think or what you think, only what they thought and what the subsequent other evidence substantiates either validating their claim or not and what a potential jury might decide on the subject.

I’ve explained elsewhere on this HN thread what I observed from the videos we have all seen by now and why I think it will be difficult to waive the qualified immunity of the officer to pursue criminal charges against him. This particular spur of the thread is about whether or not law enforcement can detain people. They have the force and capability to detain, and they have case law that allows it.

Whatever ICE claims, the murderer broke protocol and whatever excuse they’ll try, surely “feared for his life” doesn’t count.

Operating manuals state that officers cannot use deadly force to stop a vehicle, even if the vehicle itself is used as a weapon, if they can get out of its way instead.

This is clearly a case of an untrained, unhinged, far-right militant, itching for an opportunity to fire and kill a “fucking bitch” (seems ICE is leaving the indefensible idiot out to dry, and prepared the ground by releasing the video from the murderer’s phone).

It’s a hate crime, pure and simple.

The preemptive "It doesn’t matter what I think or what you think" tells us that you know damn well this wasn't legal or appropriate. I stand by my analysis, you are defending this madness on the internet not because you know it's correct on principle but because you want it to be correct.

You want to live in a world where your enemies are afraid of gestapo-like goon squads who will shoot them in the face if they do the wrong thing. You think they deserve it, that the work of the goons is important and worth some violence to enable, and surely that such violence would never be used inappropriately.

Just be clear in your own mind what you're cheering for. It's not new. Historically this never ends at plausibly-justified-minutiae about law enforcement practice.

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