It’s far from certain that officer Derek Chauvin will be convicted of murder in the killing of George Floyd. But there’s almost no chance that officer Garrett Rolfe will be convicted of murder in the killing of Rayshard Brooks.
Anyone with even a basic law school education could tell you that. But by charging Atlanta police officer Garrett Rolfe with capital murder, Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard shows he has politics foremost on his mind. Running for reelection in a tough primary fight, Howard is the subject of two separate investigations. He suggests that because Rolfe used his firearm to shoot Brooks and then stated, “I got him,” he engaged in a capricious act of murder.
The problem? This charge shows willful blindness to the circumstances in which Rolfe fired his weapon.
Yes, there is a case to say that Rolfe may have unlawfully assaulted Brooks by apparently attacking him after he was no longer a threat. But there is no evidence to support the filing of capital charges. The two issues are distinct and separate. After all, Rolfe did not simply walk up to Brooks and shoot him dead. As body camera and security camera footage of the incident clearly show, Rolfe fired his weapon only after Brooks fired a Taser at Rolfe at close range. Brooks grabbed that Taser after scuffling with the officers who were attempting to arrest him for public intoxication.
These facts matter.
When Brooks chose to resist the officers with force and then fired the Taser at them, Rolfe acquired a reasonable perception of an imminent threat of serious bodily harm or death. Rolfe might have feared suffering a heart attack from the Taser, or being incapacitated and knocking his head on the road. Regardless, the key is that Rolfe’s defense team can credibly claim he was in reasonable fear for his life at that moment. By the facts applied to law, that will not be difficult.
That difficulty will be further lessened by Howard’s own hypocrisy.
After all, barely a week ago, Howard charged two police officers with aggravated assault for using their Tasers on a group of college students. That charging choice matters because Georgia law defines aggravated assault as using “a deadly weapon or with any object, device, or instrument which, when used offensively against a person, is likely to or actually does result in serious bodily injury.”
Howard has thus shown that he believes Tasers do constitute a “deadly weapon.” In turn, he’s going to struggle to make the case that some police Tasers are more equal than others.
Rolfe may very well have made the wrong choice in this tragedy. Indeed, he probably did. But that doesn’t matter when it comes to the law. What matters is that the officer perceived an imminent threat in the face of violent criminal conduct. The law says he had the right to use lethal force. His actions following the shooting are a very different issue.
