State laws generally allow law enforcement to legally use lethal force against a suspect if he or she poses an “imminent threat” to the officer or other innocent parties, which is underscored by a standard of whether the force is “proportional and necessary.” A 1985 Supreme Court case called Tennessee v. Garner allows for deadly force if a fleeing suspect poses “a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”
Does the means of killing matter for that legal standard? In this case, probably not, according to several legal experts I spoke to. The bomb disposal robot that turned into an improvised remotely triggered killing machine wasn’t autonomous and can, in this instance, be looked at as a tool that was used to diminish the threat suspect Micah Johnson posed to Dallas police officers. [...]
“There’s a road we’re starting to go down here … by taking a robot originally designed to disarm bombs and using it to blow people up, the Dallas Police end up reconfiguring the realm of what is possible,” he continued. “And, as we have seen by their response, expanding the arsenal of possibility in this way makes it easier to recalibrate the calculus regarding which actions are necessary. Very quickly the argument moves from 'we can use a robot to blow him up' to 'we saw no other option but to use our bomb robot.’”
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