If a claim of self defense as justification for brutally attacking an unarmed man sounds familiar, Harris’s attorney, S. Lee Merritt, thinks it should.
"It works for cops, that's what I thought when I heard it. It sounds very familiar from police brutality cases,” Merritt told me. “Unfortunately in our culture black men are often seen as threatening even when they're the victims, as Mr. Harris clearly was." [...]
For police, the fear defense has been effective. The Supreme Court has held that police can use lethal force if they have a “reasonable” belief that a suspect might hurt them or others, and through the warped prism of America, any fear of a black male can seem “reasonable” to a jury, especially if that jury is all-white. Grand juries consistently fail to indict cops who kill unarmed black people, even when those killed are children, like Tamir Rice. And those officers that do go to trial often prevail on the grounds that they were simply scared, like when Chicago Police Officer Dante Servin was acquitted after he fired five shots into an alleyway at four people who had their backs turned to him, killing Rekia Boyd. Servin said he feared for his life. The first attempt to prosecute Michael Slager, the South Carolina officer who was recorded on video shooting Walter Scott in the back, ended in a mistrial. In perhaps the most famous example, the Los Angeles officers shown beating Rodney King senseless on video in 1991 were acquitted. [...]
Virginia state laws only contain hate-crime enhancements for lesser charges, which means that in pursuing the more serious malicious wounding charge, prosecutors had to avoid discussing Goodwin and Ramos’s ideological leanings—that is, their motive for showing up at a racist rally in the first place. "We charged the most serious offense that we could under state law with the highest maximum penalty," Joseph Platania, the Commonwealth’s attorney for the city of Charlottesville told me after Goodwin was convicted. "We are appreciative of the careful attention the jury paid to the facts and are satisfied with the result."
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