The Brown Case Study

Today, officers are being heavily scrutinized by the public for their actions and are being charged with serious crimes such as murder and manslaughter at a much higher rate than from 2005 to 2015. Gorman (2015) noted that thousands of individuals across the United States have been killed by the police since 2005, yet an extremely small percentage was charged. According to Ryan Gorman (2015), since 2005 fifty four officers have been charged with fatally shootings a suspect with on duty, but only eleven police officers have been convicted. Of the eleven officers who were convicted of the shootings they were involved in, nine were given sentence ranging from six months to seven years. Kindy and Kelly (2015) note that juror are often hesitant …show more content…
First, Officer Wilson was conducting a lawful enforcement procedure because he was trying to investigate if Brown was the individual that robbed the convenience store minutes before the deadly encounter. For this particular case there was no camera recording of the incident, which would have made it difficult to debunk Officer Wilson’s statement. According to the Graham factors, if an Officer believes that a suspect is an immediate threat reasonable force can be used (Schwartz and Virga, 2016). When Officer Wilson fired several shots at Brown, he was coming after the officer after they already had a physical altercation and Brown had tried to disarm the officer. Overall, Officer Wilson was not held accountable with the death of Brown, but it created additional racial tending that exists between the police and …show more content…
Slager admitted to using excessive force in the shooting death of Scott. Slager pled guilty to a federal charge of deprivation of rights under the color of law, which has a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. In exchange for this guilty plea, murder charges and two other federal charges were dismissed. Prior to this agreement Officer Slager stood trial for the murder of Scott, but the jury could not reach a verdict. According to Slager’s statements, he felt fear for his life because of the way Scott acted, but the video clearly shows that Scott was not an immediate threat as he was fleeing away from Officer Slager. Both of the cases mentioned above caused national outrage because the suspects were unarmed African American males. The outcomes were different and many may argue note that the video and media attention of Scott’s killing played a role on his guilty