AZ-Remember the innocent man gunned down by Pima Co. cops?

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Hat tip to RPF member Lucille.

This deserved its own thread.

If we were half the men we were 200 years ago, justice would have been done.

At any rate, the ever epic Will Grigg, ladies and gentlemen.


Pima County Tax Victims to Indemnify Murder of Jose Guerena

William Norman Grigg at 14:29 pm EDT on September 09, 2013

http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/pima-county-tax-victims-to-indemnify-murder-of-jose-guerena/

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Jose Junior runs out of house after cops light up his dad and leave him to die.

Jose Guerena, a 26-year-old father of two young boys, was murdered in his Tucson, Arizona home in May 2011 by a state-licensed death squad called the Pima County SWAT team. The government afflicting Pima County has announced that it will offer tax victims residing therein the privilege of indemnifying that murder by underwriting a settlement with the victim’s family.

Jose was sleeping after finishing a graveyard shift at a local copper mine when he heard his terrified wife, Vanessa, scream that there were armed men on their property. Jose, an honorably discharged Marine who served two tours in Iraq, told Vanessa to take their four-year-old son, Jose, Jr., and hide in the closet. He grabbed his legally obtained AR-15 rifle and placed himself between his family and the intruders, where he died following a 71-shot fusillade.

The home invaders, being police officers, were very poor marksmen, which accounts for the fact that only 22 of the shots actually hit the victim, and none of the wounds was fatal — if immediate medical care had been provided. The SWAT team included a medic who had both the ability and the legal responsibility to provide aid. Instead, the team turned away paramedics who arrived shortly after the shooting in response to Vanessa’s frantic 911 call. They then assaulted Vanessa after she had tearfully pleaded with them to help her dying husband, and delivered her to be interrogated by detectives about the contents of the home — which underscored the fact that the search warrant used to justify the SWAT raid was invalid, since it didn’t accuse Jose of a specific crime, or list specific items being sought.

While Vanessa was being abused, and Jose was bleeding to death, the couple’s traumatized four-year-old son was left alone in the home, because the raiders — restrained by the sacred imperative of officer safety — refused to enter the home and retrieve the youngster until they were sure that his father was dead. Jose, Jr. eventually staggered out of the home by himself, most likely after witnessing the death rattle of the loving father who had shielded him, and his mother, with his body.

According to the Pima County Sheriff’s Office, Jose Guerena was the “muscle” of a local marijuana smuggling ring. No evidence to substantiate that claim existed at the time of the May 2011 raid, and none has been produced since. The Sheriff’s Office had kept Jose under surveillance and was aware of the fact that he was working the graveyard shift at the Asarco cooper mine, which means he would have had neither the time nor the energy to moonlight as a drug kingpin — and if he had been a successful marijuana entrepreneur, he wouldn’t have had to slave away in a copper mine. The affidavit requesting a search warrant was cankered with similar contradictions, and riddled with other implausibilities. In fact, the Sheriff’s Office never bothered to get its story straight long after the lethal raid.

After Jose was murdered, Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, the intellectually stunted figurehead commanding the Pima County Death Squad, defamed the victim by claiming hat he was part of a “very violent organization.” Yet more than a year after his Einsatzgruppen slaughtered Jose, some of Dupnik’s relatively housebroken minions — wearing conventional attire, and eschewing the familiar paramilitary pageantry — carried out arrests of some of Jose’s relatives after they had been charged with narcotics offenses.

No evidence was ever found implicating Jose in an offense. The raid was unwarranted, and by allowing the victim to bleed to death the SWAT operators committed second degree murder under Arizona law. The County DA, predictably, ruled that the use of lethal force was “justified,” which means that he will not prosecute Jose Guerena’s murderers. Thanks to the pernicious doctrine of “qualified immunity,” the killers won’t face professional or civil sanctions. The subsidized civil settlement with Guerna’s widow and now-fatherless sons will obviate the need even for a token act of contrition, let alone genuine repentance, on the part of those who murdered a father for the supposed offense of defending his family against a home invasion.
 
I bought the audio version of Rise of the Warrior Cop today and started listening. It makes my blood boil.
 
My name is Jose Guerena, honorably discharged Marine who served two tours in Iraq, loyal servant to the Constitution Of The United States. Father to fatherless sons, husband to a now widow wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this election or the next.
 
My name is Jose Guerena, honorably discharged Marine who served two tours in Iraq, loyal servant to the Constitution Of The United States. Father to fatherless sons, husband to a now widow wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this election or the next.
What's an election going to do for you? Weak sauce.
 
I'm guessing here, but pretty sure that was his point. ;)

Perhaps.

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik: He was just another illegal who probably broke the law!

Vanessa: Allegedly wasn't it? That's gonna look real good on his grave stone in Arlington: Here lies Jose Guerena, honorably discharged Marine who served two tours in Iraq, survivor of countless incursions behind enemy lines. Killed for allegedly breaking a law in JerkPima, USA.

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik: Now don't give me any of that crap Vanessa. Do you think Guerena was the only guy who had a tough time in Iraq? He allegedly broke the law for Christ's sake!

Vanessa: You're goddamn lucky this isn't an election year.
 
My name is Jose Guerena, honorably discharged Marine who served two tours in Iraq, loyal servant to the Constitution Of The United States. Father to fatherless sons, husband to a now widow wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this election or the next.


If history has taught us anything, it's that elections solve such problems. Of course, I'm just amusing myself here.
 
Damn right make that insurance company pay.

That's justice served right there. /sarc

Likely self-insured for that amount. The taxpayers take the hit. But your point is still valid - the cops themselves suffer little if any penalty.

Dupnik is awful. Really awful. He is a Democratic party puppet, mouthing whatever script they hand him. He was one of the first to try and make political hay out of the Gifford shooting, blaming it on "extreme" criticism of government.
 
Radley Balko at PuffHo:

Under the terms of a settlement announced last week, the family of former Marine and Iraq war veteran Jose Guerena will receive $3.4 million from the various police agencies involved in his death. The bulk of the settlement, $2.35 million, will come from Pima County, Ariz. Despite the settlement, the county admits no wrongdoing, and none of the officers involved have been fired or disciplined. The towns of Marana, Oro Valley and Sahuarita also had officers on the raid team, and will pay the remaining $1.05 million.
[...]
chiessl described the raid on Guerena's home as "amateur, undisciplined, unrehearsed and ineffective." When asked how plausible he found police claims that Guerena should have known they were cops, Schiessl replied, "Not plausible at all. The short siren burst could have been a police car passing. The flash bang grenades being used next door would have added to the confusion. When looking out a sunlit doorway from a dark hallway, it is difficult to see anything but a silhouette. Add in several people yelling, and it would be extremely difficult to comprehend what is happening if you're woken from sleep."

Schiessl added that the raiding cops should count themselves fortunate to be alive. "This team is lucky they encountered a disciplined, trained Marine who knew to hold his fire," Schliessl said. Guerena's response may have been informed by the fact that two relatives of his wife had recently been murdered during a home invasion. (The police would claim in the Guerenas' indictment that the earlier murders were part of their drug trafficking investigation of the family.)

On the Confederette Yankee blog, former SWAT officer Mike McDaniel concurred. "t is very hard indeed to see how the police acted with anything less than amazing incompetence . . . The idea that when a SWAT team breaks down the door of a home without a no-knock warrant and is thereby justified in firing on anyone who has a weapon in their hands -- in their own home -- particularly if that weapon might be aimed in their direction, is nothing less than horrifying. It is essentially saying that officers may shoot first -- in fact that they may plan beforehand to shoot first -- and be reasonably certain later."

Despite assurances from Pima County officials that the settlement is no admission of wrongdoing, settlements this large for botched drug raids are rare, and indicate officials may have expected an adverse outcome if the case went to trial. In addition to the criticisms of the raid from people like Schiessl, McDaniel and others with raid experience, CBS 5 in Phoenix reported last November that the officers involved in the raid gave conflicting testimony in their depositions for the Guerena lawsuit.

The primary purpose of lawsuits like this one are of course to make the victims whole -- or at least come as close to that as a check from the government possibly can. But there's also some hope that they'll serve as a deterrent to bad behavior, and as a mechanism for reform -- that the taxpayers who ultimately foot the bill for most of these suits will demand change. In this case, much of the settlement will be covered by a municipal insurer, and there have been a few examples where large awards have resulted in insurers pressuring cities to change. At least one Pima County official did seem to show some regret. Supervisor Richard Elías told the Arizona Daily Star last week, “It goes to show we have to be very careful on how we serve our search warrants and how we train officers from other jurisdictions,” he said.

But few shared that sentiment. Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry told the Arizona Daily Star that the settlement was a “calculated risk-management settlement.” A Sheriff's Department spokesman said, "the officers performed that day in accordance with their training and nationally recognized standards."

While sources close to the case suggest that the Pima County Sheriff's Department has made some reforms of its drug warrant protocol in the wake of Guerena's killing, the department has not publicly conceded any procedural changes, and continues to insist the Guerena raid was conducted according to the highest standards. (The Pima County Sheriff’s Department did not return HuffPost’s request for comment.)

In the end, a 26-year-old man is dead, his wife is a widow and his children are fatherless. His family will be well-compensated, but at the expense of a county insurer, and ultimately by taxpayers, not by the police officers who killed him. If it proves true that there have been at least some policy changes within the department, those changes are likely to be voluntary, and not set in stone by a law or ordinance. And still, no cops have been disciplined, and no one has admitted any wrongdoing.

There have been other drug raid deaths since Jose Guerena, and there were many before him. And until law enforcement agencies, public officials and ultimately voters stop allowing the use of violent, armed invasions of private homes to serve search warrants for drug crimes, there will undoubtedly be more.
 
3.4 m is not even enough to cover the horror the child saw and has to endure for the rest of his life. Which has me wondering... How much money should be given to compensate for the wrongful murder?

3.4 is too little imo
 
3.4 m is not even enough to cover the horror the child saw and has to endure for the rest of his life. Which has me wondering... How much money should be given to compensate for the wrongful murder?

3.4 is too little imo
As far as I'm concerned, "money" is not what this debt should be paid in.
 
The primary purpose of lawsuits like this one are of course to make the victims whole -- or at least come as close to that as a check from the government possibly can. But there's also some hope that they'll serve as a deterrent to bad behavior, and as a mechanism for reform -- that the taxpayers who ultimately foot the bill for most of these suits will demand change. In this case, much of the settlement will be covered by a municipal insurer, and there have been a few examples where large awards have resulted in insurers pressuring cities to change.

wise-popa-sloth-corrupted-by-his-own-power-can-no-leader-go-untainted.gif
 
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