Tags: Police State

Restoring the Right to Resist Arrest

We should work to re-instate statutory protection of the right to resist unlawful arrest in the 38 states that presently do not recognize that ancient and indispensable Common Law right.

Current dogma holds that citizens have a duty to defer to any order issued by an armed individual dressed in a State-issued costume. This includes permitting ourselves to be restrained, arrested, and incarcerated without just cause, on the assumption that the same State that stole our liberty will agree not to take any more of it when the matter is examined in court.

We’ve reached a point at which police can often kill innocent citizens with impunity – yet the slightest physical contact from a citizen can be prosecuted as “battery on an officer,” and a citizen wielding a flyswatter – yes, a flyswatter -- during a police raid can be accused of planning a “felonious assault” on a policeman.

Police State

That’s not to say, of course, that such outrages were rare ten, or even twenty, years ago. But now they are more plentiful – and, thanks in no small part to the growing influence of cyber-samizdat, such as YouTube, much more visible. Acts of corrupt police abuse that once could be dismissed as figments of a troubled imagination, or the invention of vindictive criminals, are now routinely exposed to worldwide public scrutiny, and the fuel of growing public outrage.

Unless a police officer is dutifully enforcing a legitimate warrant, or has unassailable probable cause to believe that an individual has committed a felony, he has no business attempting to arrest anybody. That was the understanding that prevailed in the Anglo-Saxon world, in one form or another, from 1215 until the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, at least here in the United States.

Fifty years ago, the statutes of nearly every state recognized the right to resist unlawful arrest. Today, it is recognized only Michigan, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Mississippi.* The question has been examined, and upheld in remarkably candid terms by courts in Mississippi. This is ironic, given that Mississippi is the same state where Cory Maye was convicted of first degree murder for killing a police officer who invaded Maye’s home in a late-night paramilitary raid at the wrong address.

A 1963 Mississippi Supreme Court decision (King v. State) favorably cited a legal scholar’s conclusion that “the right of personal liberty is one of the fundamental rights guaranteed to every citizen, and any unlawful interference may be resisted. Every person has a right to resist an unlawful arrest; and, in preventing such illegal restraint of his liberty, he may use such force as may be necessary.”

Not quite four decades earlier, a judge presiding over the criminal trial of a police officer accused of murdering a man who resisted arrest underscored the fact that a citizen has the right to kill a police officer attempting to arrest him without probable cause or a valid warrant. The judge instructed the jury that if the officer had been attempting an illegal arrest, the defendant was permitted to employ “whatever force was necessary to avoid the arrest, even to the extent of taking the life of [the] defendant.”

In other words: A police officer who kills a civilian in the course of an unlawful arrest is a murderer; a citizen who kills a police officer when threatened with lethal violence in the course of an unlawful arrest is exercising his innate right to self-defense.

The jury agreed with that view, convicting the officer of murder. The verdict was overturned on appeal because the jury hadn’t been permitted to consider the officer’s argument that he acted in self-defense.

The Mississippi Supreme Court conceded that an officer “attempting to make an unlawful arrest is not cut off from the right of self-defense … he is only the aggressor in the difficulty and is in no worse attitude than any other aggressor.”

There is one significant problem with that view: Armed aggressors have no right to self-defense. An armed criminal has no right to shoot back if his victims offer armed resistance. That principle should apply to aggressors of any variety – including police who stage illegal and unnecessary home invasions, or who commit violent acts in the course of unlawful arrests.

Once again, all of this was widely understood until just a few decades ago. Today, not only is that right all but unheard of, it is increasingly common for people to be arrested for resisting arrest.

A few links to get you started if you would like to research this further:

• 12-year old girl hospitalized by police assault, later arrested for resisting
• Police Get The Wrong House In Galveston, Allegedly Assault 12-Year-Old Girl
• More Details On That Bizarre Galveston Police Incident
• ARRESTED for resisting arrest
• Google Search - Arrested for resisting Arrest

Add your comment

Your name:
Your email:
Subject:
Comment:
Word verification:
	Post Preview