A judge sealed a video tape showing the aftermath of police brutality and murder of Baron Pikes. The video is to be sealed until it is submitted for evidence at trial. Lawyers on both sides were concerned that the release of the tape could taint the local jury pool.
In January of 2008, Winnfield, Louisiana police killed Pikes, an unarmed man. They handcuffed Pikes, a black man, and tasered him with a 50,000 volt taser 9 times within 14 minutes. He was handcuffed the entire time. The officer responsible was Scott Nugent, a white police officer.
According to sources, the tape was shot by Nugent, and depicts Pikes handcuffed to a chair at the Winnfield Police Department. At this point, Pikes had already been been hit several times with the taser.
Voices of people who are not on film can be heard. They are calling him "n*gger" and demanding to know if he is on drugs. Pikes begins to foam at the mouth, and appears to be struggling to breathe. Pikes then slumps to the floor and is taken to the ER, shackled, and dies (read full story here).
Studies done by the coroner showed that Pikes in fact had no trace of any drugs in his system. The coroner ruled the death a homicide and opined to CNN that Nugent had violated every police procedure for taser use.
Even if he did have drugs in his system, death by taser was not the proper punishment (if we are to assume that any punishment at all is proper).
Nugent's attorney maintains that he followed proper procedures.
Surprisingly, Nugent was actually fired and charged with a crime. Apparently police can't always get away with murder (as with the death of Fouad Kaady). Not surprisingly though, Nugent is on trial for manslaughter - whereas if any other American handcuffed an innocent man to a chair and killed him with a taser while he and his friends yelled "n*gger!", a murder charge and trial would have surely ensued.
Murder in most states is defined as the unlawful killing of human, involving either an intentional, purposeful, malicious, premeditated and/or wanton act. In many jurisdictions, a finding of murder requires that there be malice aforethought, which is either an intent to kill, or cause severe bodily harm. Malice can also be implied when the deaths are caused by extreme recklessness, or in cases when the death occurs in the commission of another serious crime.
Under any of these definitions, what happened to Pikes would have been charged as murder if any non-law enforcement person had done what Nugent did. However, because the American legal system has a long standing tradition of treating police officers as being above the law, Nugent gets away with being charged with manslaughter only.
The cliche and inept justification that rules must be more lenient for officers because the nature of their job requires quick decisions and fast actions is getting old. I cannot subscribe to a system that treats every brutalized citizen as collateral damage.
Comments
Has this former officer officially been convicted? You're making a lot of direct statements of fact in this article -- perhaps you forgot "innocent until proven guilty?" While it sure seems that Nugent is no saint and the public at large may be better off having him off his beat, from a journalism standpoint you may want to use "allegedly" a bit more in these types of stories if you want to avoid a libel lawsuit.
I said "according to sources" to lead up my description of the video. Some of this stuff is not disputed. The police dept has confirmed Pikes was handcuffed, and that Nugent fired the taser. I am not a court of law, and can think what I want. It would be facetious of me to say that even though we have a coroner's report, a dead man with no drugs in his system who was clearly tasered 9 times, ER reports of his shackled dead body, and sources saying the cops were yelling the N word, that I had absolutely no opinion as to what went on here.
I said based on these sources, he should certainly have been charged with murder, and an ordinary citizen in this situation likely would have been charged with murder.
Nugent should get the death penalty.
well i think that is pretty messed up a racist police officer shouldent have even been one in the first place. it is unfair for the black community. while whites are getting away with things the blacks are getting hammered down on and abused and harrased. in this situation if it where a black officer harrasisng a young white person he would have gooten the max penalty for being a threat to the united government and noone would have cared about it. idk about you guys but thats just me and im only 15
Why is this story considered "anti-establishment"?
This is a real question.
captbob: Because, I assume, that police is an agency arm of the government. The government is "the establishment" or "the man." And when a government agency abuses (allegedly, journo101) its power of arms in the name of keeping order, the author should jump all over that to further show that one should be "anti-establishment" because all the establishment does is abuse powers given to it by the populace. Cool, right?!
douche ass thug cops effing it for the good ones yet again. hopefully there rae some good ones left.
Jennifer Chou has a B.A. in communications studies from UCLA and received her J.D. from the University of San Diego School of Law. She was editor-in-chief of FEM Newsmagazine (Los Angeles' feminist publication) at UCLA, and was editor-in-chief of her law school newspaper.
The writer of this article is a bleeding-heart-liberal, pro-homosexual, anti-white, California BIGOT with the journalism skills of a 6th grader... This 'reporting' wreaks of the new-world-order, politically-correct bull dung variety... Take a bow, Chou.
I think I'd rather be called an N-word than be tasered to death. Why does the news seem to treat these to facts as if they were co-equal wrongs?
I did not mean to give them the impression that they were coequal. I wanted there to be no mistake that this tasering was malicious, and was not an "accident" or unexpected result.
This is a sad story.
The poor get screwed over by the system all the time.
Here where I live, a few years back, there was a black guy. He was hand cuffed with his hands behind his back. He was said to have picked up a knife, and threatened the detectives. (How ever you do that) and one of the COPS got scared and ran out of the room. The other shot hm multiple times. He died. They were cleared and still on the job from what I understand. My question is, why kind of wimps are the Police Depts hiring that they can not deal with a old black guy that has his hands behind his back, in cuffs, and he picked up a knife off the table? Did they really need to kill him?
There are other cases as well. Not granted, if a guy is wrong, and a threat, then the Police have the right to protect themselves, as well as others. But, it seems that they have no brains, or cowards. They seem to panic and pull the gun. (Not Tazer in many cases)
The Police are protected my to many laws. They seem to be able to beat people at will. And if you make a move to protect yourself, and you touch them, you are charged with a felony. And I love it how when they arrest someone, they are always screaming for all around them to hear, "Stop resisting, stop fighting." And yet these people are face down, in cuffs. It seems that they love to add that charge to get them to stick. I have seen that on COPS, and it makes me sick.
PUT THAT PIG TO SLEEP
The only reason white been racist becouse black people they freedem
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