A Black Texas man who aspired to become a police officer spent 16 months fighting felony accusations that he assaulted two officers during a “welfare check” at his home. A jury acquitted him after his son recorded video of the arrest.
The video caught Huntsville police and prosecutors by surprise, Stewart said, because they had expected to secure a conviction based on the officers’ accounts.
The cops accused Stewart of spitting in one of their faces and shoving the other officer, but none of that is captured on video.
“I don’t like to call people liars,” Stewart told ABC 13 Houston after his acquittal.
“But fabrication, yes. Cover up, yes.”
Police testimony should never be admissible as evidence without bodycam footage to back it up, not these days.
I was kicked off a jury for saying that.
The judge asked us all if we can all agree that the words of the cops was considered valid evidence.
I said no, because cops are human and infallible like all of us, and they can lie.
Judge got so mad and I wasn’t part of jury after that.
Nitpick: “infallible” means not capable of failing.
Also, judges and cops often times work together very closely, which is a practice that needs to stop.
cop - prosecutor interdependance is also a problem.
we had jury duty last sept, and they asked the potential juror pools, most got kicked off one reason or another. of course the prosecutor/defense attorney tried to sus out if people are doing it to quickly ge of jury duty as well. some courts will drag this on if they can.
fallible
flammable
ALL cop testimony is fabricated.
Next time stay quiet
Unless you’re trying to get out of it, don’t admit that next time. Don’t even consider it a lie. There’s probably some situation, like if it’s backed up with video, where you’d consider trusting it some. But you admitting that ensures everyone there does take their word as the truth. It makes the issue more pervasive. There’s a chance that you staying quite could have changed the outcome, and you could have talked to the other jurors about how often cops lie.
Yup. Require them to wear body cams at all times. If anything is taken to court and “malfunction” "broken “corrupted data” is ever an issue then their testimony is immediately thrown out.
I guarantee you will start seeing 100% uptime on those body cams after that.
Also yes, always record cops