SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS 1 Perspective 1 SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2000

THE TRAGIC SHOOTING of Amadou Diallo,
for which four New York policemen are
currently on trial, has a personal resonance for
me. Many years ago, at about the same time of
night -- around midnight -- I came within a
heartbeat of shooting someone who was also
acting suspiciously and seemed to pose a threat
to me.

I was a young Marine on guard duty that night,
in an ammunition dump out in the boondocks at
Camp Lejeune, N.C. Nobody else was
supposed to be out there and the next nearest
guard was a mile away. Yet I could hear the
soft sound of someone trying to sneak up
toward me from behind an ammunition shed.

When he turned the corner and I said "Halt!" he
froze in his tracks. Had he made a false move,
like Amadou Diallo, I would have filled him full
of lead.

My mysterious visitor turned out to be the
sergeant of the guard, sneaking up on me to see
if I were asleep on duty, for which I could have
been court-martialed. Nobody tried that again.

In cases involving police shootings, some people
are quick to jump to conclusions, even when
they are completely ignorant of guns and have
never faced the dangerous situations faced by
the police.

In the Diallo case, it is hard to think of a single
thing that the cops should have done differently
-- or that I would have done differently in their
shoes. There are some things that Amadou
Diallo should have done differently, such as not
run away from the police and then turn around
and pull something out of his jacket to point
toward them in a dimly lit hallway. What he held
out toward them was his wallet. But they
discovered that only after the shooting was over
and he was dead.

People who know nothing about guns are quick
to exclaim at how many bullets are fired in
police shooting cases. To ask why you need to
shoot somebody so many times is a legitimate
question from someone seeking knowledge. But
it is arrogant ignorance from someone
convinced that he knows something is wrong.

Pistol shooting can be very inaccurate,
especially in stressful, life-and-death situations.
In the Diallo case, more than half the shots
missed. In other cases, several times as many
shots have missed as hit.

Often you have no way of knowing whether you have hit or missed until
after the other person goes down -- and even then, you can't be sure that
he is unable to fire back.

Some of the hopelessly unrealistic questions asked by the prosecutor
were obviously meant to exploit the jurors' ignorance. "Did you see any
muzzle flash coming from Mr. Diallo's direction?" If cops are supposed to
wait until they see a muzzle flash before they fire, we are going to see a
lot more policemen's funerals. However, as Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan once said, "The number of dead policemen is of no interest to
liberals."

"Did you shoot at Mr. Diallo's legs?" was another prosecution question.
Sharpshooting like this might be tried in the peace and serenity of a pistol
range, but hardly in a situation where your own life is on the line, when
you just fire in his direction and hope to hit something.

Yet another prosecution ploy that appeals to ignorance was asking
witnesses how many seconds the shooting went on and citing expert
testimony that guns like those carried by the police can be emptied in five
seconds of shooting.

Studies have shown that most people have no conception of how long a
second is. The seconds these witnesses were talking about are unlikely to
have any relationship to the seconds actually measured by experts when
test-firing weapons.

Nobody in his right mind stands in front of someone with a gun for five
consecutive seconds on the clock. You do what the cops did -- fire a
burst and then jump back out of the line of fire, while someone else fires
another burst and jumps back.

Much has been made of a pause in the shooting described by witnesses.
With cops firing and jumping back out of the line of fire, there was
probably more than one pause from any given policeman, even if the
gunfire from other policemen made the shooting seem continuous for a
while. If there was a moment when they were all not shooting, that would
have been a pause that witnesses could have noticed.

The insinuation from all this talk about a pause is that the cops fired
continuously, had time to see that Amadou Diallo was helpless and yet
wantonly resumed shooting. But an insinuation is hardly proof beyond a
reasonable doubt. 

Or does that basic principle of the law matter in this highly politicized
case? 
	Do you want to live under the rule of law or under mob rule? Virtually everyone will say that they want to live under the rule of law. But what people say is not nearly as important as what they do. And what far too many people are doing is moving us closer toward mob rule.
	The trial was a painful but classic example. It was clear what the angry mobs wanted: convictions. So did our so-called first lady, who declared that it was "murder" before the first speck of evidence was presented in a court of law. (She later retracted the statement.)
	Both in the courtroom and in the media, those who thwarted the mob's desires had their addresses made public. One witness who said Diallo was acting suspiciously, even before the police arrived on the scene, not only had his street address but his apartment number made public by the prosecuting attorney in the courtroom.
	Where this witness lived was absolutely irrelevant to whether these policemen were guilty or innocent because the witness testified only to what he saw while on the street walking home.
	It was relevant to intimidating a witness for the defense, who had to fear that what he said on the stand could put himself and his family in danger.
	A nurse who was attending a patient across the street from the shooting was asked for the patient's name, even though the patient was not a witness and had not claimed to have seen or heard anything. When an objection was raised to that information, the prosecutor then wanted to know whether the patient was a manor a woman and what age. None of this had anything to do with whether the police were guilty or innocent.  But it had a lot to do with intimidating a witness who might fear for the safety of someone who was ill and helpless.
	Before testifying, both these witnesses had asked that their faces not be shown on television. They were obviously already concerned for their safety should they say something that the mob didn't like. Against that background, for the prosecutor to be trying to identify people and pinpoint addresses that had nothing to do with the issue before the court was unconscionable. For the presiding judge to sit there and let it happen was disgraceful.
	This was the same judge who ordered a witness' statement that Diallo was acting suspicious stricken from the record.
	It is ironic that one of the charges against the police was reckless endangerment.  But that is precisely what happened to witnesses in the courtroom and to jurors after they had acquitted those whom the mob wanted convicted.
	At the end of the trial, the judge read a statement from both the jurors and the alternates, saying they did not want any contact with the media. Yet not only were they deluged with phone calls from the media and others, but the jury foreman also had her name and the town she lived in published in the New York Times.
	This is not the first time the New York Times has published the names of jurors who reached a verdict the newspaper didn't like. It published the names and employers of the jurors who acquitted the police officers charged in the beating of Rodney King.
	Do we want witnesses who will say what they saw or who will say only what the mob wants to hear? Do we want witnesses who will refuse to come forward to say anything at all because they know that they might be putting themselves and their families in danger?
	Do we want jurors who will decide the case on the basis of the evidence in the courtroom or on the basis of the mobs outside the courtroom - or the mobs that could be outside their homes if they don't vote the way the media, the activists and the loudmouths want them to vote?
	The media in general, with their constant drumbeat of four "white" policemen who shot a "black" man, did not cover themselves with glory even if they did not all sink to the level of the New York Times in abetting mob influence on the judicial process.
	Incidentally, in a truly hideous and deliberate crime committed while this trial was going on, a just-paroled criminal hijacked a car and dragged the little boy who was in it to his death. But no one pointed out that the race of this criminal differed from the race of his victim. Race is hyped only when it is politically correct.
	The politicization of justice whether in the media or in the courtrooms - is playing with a fire that can consume us all.