Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Why Is it a 'Crime' To Disarm a Uniformed Aggressor?

From:  Rockwell.com 

 by William Norman Grigg

Sheriff Terry Maketa of Colorado’s El Paso County has promised his constituents that he "will actively oppose any effort that infringes upon your second amendment rights."
"Like every elected official in the state, I took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Colorado," wrote Maketa in an open letter to El Paso County residents. "This means all rights."

That promise apparently doesn’t apply to the right of an unarmed citizen to defend himself against acts of criminal violence committed by one of Maketa’s deputies. If it did, Maketa – who, like every other sheriff, has some discretion regarding prosecutions – would have urged the local prosecutor to drop all charges against Calhan, Colorado resident David Goss, a sod farmer who is now serving an unjustified four-year prison sentence for the supposed crime of trying to avoid being shot in the stomach by Deputy Jeff Schulz. 

On the evening of June 16, 2011, Deputy Schulz responded to a call from a woman who had been chased away by Goss after she and several friends accidentally trespassed on his farm. 
In the weeks leading up to that incident, Goss – who would later be described by a trial judge as "a pillar of his community" – had suffered a series of robberies and received no help from the Sheriff’s Office. He was sitting in his pickup at the end of a long driveway when Schulz arrived. Owing to his understandable frustration, Goss had been abrupt and inhospitable in dealing with the unwanted visitors, and his mood didn’t improve when Schulz showed up.

According to Shulz’s original account of the confrontation, Goss approached his vehicle in a "menacing" fashion, which prompted the officer to whirl around and shoot him with a Taser. Goss was not a criminal suspect. After being attacked without cause on his own property, Goss removed the Taser barbs and then knocked the weapon out of the assailant’s hands. This act of self-defense was later described as the supposed crime of "disarming an officer."
A struggle then ensued in which the deputy – despite being larger and younger than the farmer – supposedly wound up pinned to the ground on his back as Goss repeatedly beat him with his own radio and threatened to kill him. At that point, Schulz – supposedly fearing for his life – shot the unarmed and already traumatized farmer in self-defense.
That was not to be the only version of the story told by Schulz. Furthermore, eyewitnesses to the struggle told a very different story: In their account, Schulz had drawn his gun and was struggling with Goss while firing wildly. One of the rounds struck the car being driven by Goss’s wife, who, out of concern for her husband, had come down the driveway. 

After shooting Goss in the stomach, Schulz attempted to shoot him again, but the gun misfired. Schulz – visibly agitated and muttering to himself – spent several minutes driving in circles in his police vehicle, without calling for an ambulance. Shulz also threatened several eyewitnesses on the scene.

Confronted about his inconsistencies on the witness stand, Schulz – a paragon of self-pity who was reduced to blubbering at several points during Goss’s trial – insisted that "the situation was chaotic …. So if I don’t remember something that’s normal and typical." Since cops are trained and given official permission to lie, self-serving perjury of this kind is, as Deputy Schulz said, entirely normal and typical. 

Defense attorney Geoffrey Heim produced photographs of Deputy Schulz after the incident showing that there was dust on the left leg of his trousers, but none on his back. Prosecutor Tanya Karimi dismissed that critical evidence of perjury by maintaining that Schulz was merely "mistaken" about how he had landed on the ground, and that he was on his side when the struggle took place. That version, fatally undermined the melodramatic depiction of Goss was kneeling on Schulz’s chest and beating him severely.  MORE

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