Title: Sheriff Hailed Cops as Heroes, But Dashcam Shows them Listen to 3 Girls Scream as they Drowned Source:
Free Thought Project URL Source:http://thefreethoughtproject.com/da ... cops-lied-save-drowning-teens/ Published:Apr 20, 2016 Author:Andrew Emett Post Date:2016-04-20 09:40:32 by Deckard Keywords:None Views:14715 Comments:68
St. Petersburg, FL – Newly released dash cam footage reveals a Florida sheriff lied last month when he falsely claimed that his deputies took off their gun belts and attempted to save three drowning teenage girls. Instead of attempting to rescue the dying teens, the deputies can be seen on video standing beside the pond while listening to the girls’ final screams.
According to Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, a friend asked 35-year-old Damien Marriott to drive the three teenage girls to Child’s Park on Wednesday, March 30. For some reason, Marriott reportedly stopped at a Walmart to buy a TV when he left his keys in the ignition with the engine running along with three girls that he did not know sitting in his 1990 Honda Accord. Although Child’s Park closes at 8 p.m. on Wednesdays, Marriott did not return to his vehicle or report his car stolen until 8:30 p.m. that night.
Several hours later, deputies reported seeing the Honda run a red light without its headlights on during a pursuit. Entering the back of a cemetery, the girls accidentally drove the Honda into a pond as deputies exited their vehicles and remained standing on shore.
While the Honda submerged into the swamp, a recently released police dash cam video recorded a deputy exclaiming, “I hear them yelling, I think!”
As the video moves forward another deputy can be heard saying, “They’re done. They are 6-7, dude.”
“They were yelling,” a deputy responds. “I thought I heard yelling.”
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“As it was going down,” the other deputy interjects. “But now, they’re done. They’re done.”
Although Sheriff Gualtieri announced at a press conference that his deputies flung off their gun belts and dove into the swamp in a failed attempt to save the teenage girls, police dash cam video actually shows the deputies standing near the shore listening to the girls scream to death.
Two hours later, a tow truck pulled out a vehicle containing the deceased bodies of 16-year-old Dominique Battle from St. Petersburg High School, 15-year-old Ashaunti Butler from Dixie Hollins High, and 15-year-old Laniya Miller from Gibbs High.
“My daughter was not perfect,” Miller’s mother, Natasha Winkler, recently told ABC Action News through tears. “What 15-year-old is?”
Despite the fact that the sheriff initially released false information and his deputies likely provided false reports claiming they tore off their gun belts and dove into the murky water to save the dying teen girls, no criminal charges have been filed against any of the deceitful deputies. Caught on police dash cam video, the deputies clearly falsified their reports after standing around while callously listening to the drowning girls die.
"Several hours later, deputies reported seeing the Honda run a red light without its headlights on during a pursuit."
Stolen car, fleeing the police (placing both civilian lives and the lives of police officers at risk), running a red light at night with no deadlights.
OK. Show of hands. Who wants to strip down and jump into a murky pond, at night, and risk drowning to save the scumbags in the car?
Who wants to strip down and jump into a murky pond, at night, and risk drowning to save the scumbags in the car?
ANYBODY and EVERYBODY that raises their hand and takes a oath to protect the public,and then takes "the Kings money" to do so. They did not have to save even one of those girls,but they damn sure had obligation to TRY.
ANYBODY and EVERYBODY that raises their hand and takes a oath to protect the public,and then takes "the Kings money" to do so. They did not have to save even one of those girls,but they damn sure had obligation to TRY.
Whatever duty you assume to exist, there is no legal duty to rescue.
Lisa McCabe, Police Officers' Duty to Rescue or Aid: Are They Only Good Samaritans, 72 Cal. L. Rev. 661 (1984). Available at: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/californialawreview/vol72/iss4/10
Conclusion of Law Review paper arguing their should be a duty to rescue.
Police officers hold a unique position in society: they are protectors of public safety and at the same time they are governmental employees. This unique role should be acknowledged through a police duty to rescue. Such a duty comports with public expectations of police responsibilities, exposes the police to no undue risk, and requires reasonable affirmative efforts to rescue those in immediate physical danger. The recognition of this professional duty and standard of care is both justified and overdue.
There is no duty to rescue, for cops or ordinary citizens. Watching someone drown, even when one has the means available to save him, does not create legal liability.
Watching someone drown, even when one has the means available to save him, does not create legal liability.
I disagree. There is such a thing as institutional liability,and police and fire departments clearly come under that heading,or why even bother to have them? It would be like having a military that refuses to fight.
I disagree. There is such a thing as institutional liability,and police and fire departments clearly come under that heading,or why even bother to have them? It would be like having a military that refuses to fight.
You are free to disagree all you want. You are free to expound your opinion about the way things ought to be. That does not change the way the law is. There is no duty to rescue, and police and fire departments clearly do NOT come under a duty that does not exist.
For combatant military (not medics, etc.) it is a lawful duty to fight. Refusal generally gets a court-martial.
In Wait, What?, our law student contributors share unexpected lessons from law school. Here, Gilad Edelman writes on the duty to rescue (spoiler alert: there is no such thing).
A pillar of every first-year law curriculum is the subject of torts, the area of law covering suits over harm to people and property. For a lot of Americans, tort suits have a lot to do with why they hate lawyers. It’s a cliché that we live in a litigious society, and Americans like to gripe about how vulnerable we’ve become to being sued.
And yet, the most surprising thing I learned in first-year Torts concerns a limitation on liability where I didn’t expect it: generally speaking, you can’t be sued for failing to help someone in distress. Forget the Seinfeld finale; in America, with few exceptions, if you see someone in danger—a kid diving into the shallow end, George Bush choking on a pretzel, James Bond with a laser headed for his crotch—you can stand by and do nothing. You may be a bad person, but you won’t be liable in court.
Learning this felt especially counterintuitive because the topic we started the course with was the “standard of care,” which refers to how you have to behave to avoid being held liable in court. Generally speaking, the question of whether someone is liable (whether she’s breached the standard of care) for harm caused unintentionally comes down to the question of negligence—and that ultimately comes down to questions of reasonableness. The general idea is that if you’ve acted as we expect a reasonable person to in a given situation, then (1) you’re morally blameless and shouldn’t be punished, and (2) liability wouldn’t influence behavior, since you were already taking reasonable care—or put another way, it would make people become more cautious than we think desirable.
So why am I not liable for failure to rescue? Suppose, for instance, that I’m walking by a pond and see a baby drowning in two feet of water. It would pose no risk to me to save her life by bending over to pick her up. Yet if I don’t, her parents can’t sue me for wrongful death. But how can that be true, since most people would agree that my behavior fails the test of reasonableness (and of basic humanity)?
The law’s answer is that I didn’t owe the baby any duty of care. And if I don’t owe a duty of care, it doesn’t matter whether my inaction was reasonable.
In the case of actions, the question of duty is usually pretty simple: we owe a duty of care to the people our actions affect. But when it comes to inaction, the law is hesitant to impose a duty outside of certain special situations.
I should say, judges are hesitant, because in our legal tradition duty is mostly judge-made law. When we talk about whether a duty exists in a certain context, we’re almost always talking about whether judges have decided it’s a good idea from a public policy perspective to hold people liable for harms caused in those contexts. As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it in 1897, “a legal duty so called is nothing but a prediction that if a man does or omits certain things he will be made to suffer in this or that way by judgment of the court (Legislatures sometimes step in and create legal duties through statutes. A few states have passed laws imposing versions of a duty to help under threat of modest criminal penalties. Usually the duty is limited to calling the police, and imposed only where the situation is sufficiently grave.)
There are some situations where judges have decided you do have an affirmative duty to act. These vary somewhat from state to state, but the main categories are: (1) you have some special fiduciary obligation to the victim, like a teacher to a student; (2) a special relationship with the perpetrator (or “tortfeasor,” if you want to get fancy, lawyer-style) as a parent whose child causes harm; (3) you yourself created the risk, though innocently; and (4) you have already started trying to help the person.
That’s right: you may be more exposed to tort liability if you do help than if you don’t. This is the extra-weird caramel center of the no-duty-to-rescue doctrine. In many states, if you do pick up that drowning baby, you now have a duty of reasonable care, and can be sued if you negligently cause harm in helping her.
So there are exceptions to the no-duty-to-rescue rule. But in your bread and butter, see-someone-walking-into-open-sewer-and-don’t-say-anything situation, judges in most states have historically declined to impose a duty to rescue. Partly this stems from autonomy interests. Although we’re fine mandating that people play by the rules when choosing to undertake a given activity, we’re pretty uncomfortable requiring people to take action in the first place. (This distinction is often referred to as “misfeasance” versus “nonfeasance”: you’re liable for doing something the wrong way, but not for doing nothing at all.)
There are also causation issues: does it make sense, philosophically, to say that my failing to rescue the baby caused it to drown? Then there are what we might call administrative issues: how do we draw the boundaries of liability? How far out of our way should we be expected to go to save someone? Do we have to balance the cost to ourselves against the cost to the person in peril? If there are ten people in position to rescue someone, do they all have a duty? Is it the same duty? Does the ablest person have the greatest duty?
It’s the stickiness of questions like these that have led judges to avoid imposing a duty to rescue in most cases. Although our legal rules tend to reflect society’s moral preferences, there are limits to the extent to which the law can enforce morality. The impracticality of imposing a duty to rescue is one such limitation.
That’s what our reactions to situations of seeming excessive liability and to this seeming lack of liability have in common: a sense that the law is not lining up with our feelings about moral right and wrong. On the other hand, having read this, the next time you go out of your way to rescue someone you’ll know you did it out of moral goodness, not because you thought you had to. Maybe that’s worth something to us, too.
