Fifth Avenue Forum

A Georgia state trooper was arrested and charged with murder on Friday after he fatally shot a 60-year-old man who allegedly tried to flee during a rural traffic stop.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) announced that Jacob Gordon Thompson, 27, was booked on felony murder and aggravated assault charges stemming from the Aug. 7 death of Julian Edward Roosevelt Lewis.

An attorney for Lewis’s family told The Associated Press that Thompson initiated the traffic stop in Screven County over a burned-out tail light, shooting Lewis immediately after the trooper had forced his car into a ditch.

“Mr. Lewis never got out of the vehicle and the investigation will show that, mere seconds after the crash, he was shot to death, shot in the face and killed,” attorney Francys Johnson said.

Johnson told the outlet that the GBI disclosed that information to the family, but the agency did not include those details in its statement on the trooper’s arrest.

The Rev. James Woodall, president of the Georgia NAACP, decried the incident as a case of racial profiling and the latest example of a white law enforcement officer killing a Black man.

“No one should have to bury a loved one simply because of a busted tail light,” Woodall said, saying that the trooper’s arrest was not cause for celebration. “We are not necessarily happy right now. Yes, the man was arrested, but we’re done dying."

The initial press release following the incident states that Lewis’s car did not stop and that Thompson initiated a brief chase down several county roads.

The agency said the trooper initiated a precision intervention technique (PIT) that made the car come to a stop in a ditch.

The GBI did not provide any other details about the altercation, stating only that the trooper fired one round that struck Lewis, who was pronounced dead at the scene. The trooper was not injured.

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Pig cops do enough actual evil, there is no need to try to make something out of nothing.

So cops pulling up in an unmarked car and grabbing someone off the street is... fine?

A police officer who allegedly kneed a suspect 20 to 30 times in the eye after the man had been restrained is entitled to qualified immunity and thus cannot be sued over the incident, a federal court confirmed Monday.

Charles McManemy, who law enforcement suspected was making a drug delivery, claims that Deputy Bruce Tierney of Iowa's Butler County Sheriff's Office violated his Fourth Amendment rights by using excessive force after McManemy had surrendered with at least four cops already on top of him. Following the incident, McManemy says he suffered lasting damage in his eye with increased light sensitivity and "floaters." But while a majority of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that Tierney did indeed violate McManemy's rights, his suit "fails for a different reason: the absence of a clearly established right."

"McManemy must point to a case that 'squarely governs the specific facts at issue'" to prevail in withholding qualified immunity from Tierney, writes Circuit Judge David R. Stras. Such is the standard required by the legal doctrine, which shields public officials from civil liability: if a plaintiff cannot point to a near-identical scenario of police misconduct that has already been litigated and condemned in pre-existing case law, they may not sue the officer or officers who harmed them—even when the court finds the conduct in question violated their rights.