Police Use Of Deadly Force Since The Seventies Essay Example

In the 1970s in the United States, the government and the police went on a new tough-on-crime crusade. Police clamped down everywhere, getting tougher and tougher, and terrible tragedies resulted from this, with unarmed suspected felons being gunned down in cold blood. Various states had instituted new “fleeing felon” statutes. These statutes allowed for police using deadly force to stop suspects from running, whether they were armed or not. There were many more shootings of officers as well. It was as if the nation had gone crazy with deadly force, with dreadful results.
In the U.S. courts, the problem was finally recognized, and in 1985, the fleeing felon rule was changed fairly dramatically. The new law stated that non-lethal force should be employed by officers in most cases. Deadly force is not to be employed unless it is essential to stop a suspect from fleeing and the officer has good reason to believe that that fleeing suspect might be capable of causing serious harm or death to the policeman or to others.
The court went on to say that the officer may not kill an unarmed, not-dangerous suspect with his gun. However, in cases where there is reasonable cause to believe that the escaping suspect might cause severe physical harm to anyone, then it is acceptable to employ deadly force to try to prevent that escape from being successful. Also part of the new law is the inclusion that if an officer is in full-on pursuit, he may follow an escaping suspect into non-public places without a warrant. However, co-defendants who use deadly force against an escaping accomplice are not protected by the same fleeing felon rule. This law has greatly reduced the number of killings of unarmed suspects throughout the country, although it still goes on and has certainly been prominent in the news in recent months (e.g., the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson).
Pretrial release is a very important goal for a client and his attorney. There have been studies proving that there is a connection between pre-trial release and the outcome at trial. One barrier that exists to pretrial release is past criminal history and a history of court appearances that were missed. If the client does not reveal all of these and they are uncovered by the court, the client won’t be trusted, and further legal action may be taken against him. Additionally, there may be cultural and language barriers to full self-revelation. And cultural and racial biases may influence which suspects are released and which are not, although, of course, this is illegal.
Indigency may cause a judge to deny pretrial release to a suspect. An individualized assessment of each client for flight-risk and other factors is supposed to be conducted before bail is or is not offered, but there are still many cases where an affluent suspect who has committed a certain crime is released pretrial, and a poor suspect who committed the same crime is not. The Federal Bail Reform Act of 1966 is supposed to prevent against this happening, but reports state that it still does happen more often than not.
These are just a few of the barriers defendants face when trying to secure pretrial release. The defendant must do exactly what his attorney tells him to do, since the attorney usually has far more experience with these matters than the defendant does. And the defendant must speak the full truth when explaining his past criminal history. Obviously, the laws of the country need to continue to be adjusted to provide for as close to total fairness in this domain as possible. The laws about pretrial release are still not perfect, but great progress has been made over the years.