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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