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BART Officer Who Killed Unarmed Man Gets 2 Years, Oakland Riots
Police made more than 150 arrests as a crowd rioted against a Los Angeles court decision to sentence a white former transit officer to the minimum term for fatally shooting an unarmed black man in the back while he was face down on the ground.

The shooting was captured on video by several train riders.

The unrest was the latest in the case against defendant Johannes Mehserle, which has provoked periodic racial strife in Oakland since he shot and killed Oscar Grant while trying to arrest him on an Oakland train platform nearly two years ago.

The protests erupted hours after Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Perry sentenced Mehserle to a two-year prison sentence, from which he will likely only serve six or seven months, provoking immediate anger from the victim's family and friends who demanded a much harsher punishment.
The video is pretty damning: officer stands up, pulls gun from holster, points it as suspect's back while the suspect is being restrained, fires it once, and returns it to his holster.
Apparently he claimed he thought he was grabbing his taser instead. If the judge believed him, that would explain the minimal sentence. How well trained are transit officers in comparison to regular police?
I wasn't aware that the proper response, faced with a man who is trying to grab your Taser, was to shoot said man in the back ...
My apologies, I phrased that badly. Transit officer Mehserle thought he was taking out his own taser, but reached for the wrong thing. Instead of electrocuting the victim on the ground, Officer Mehserle shot bullets into him. Look at Mehserle's body language in the last seconds of the video linked above. In the video linked in the comment thread below, the reporter says Mehserle was "a two year veteran", which I presume means he'd been a transit officer for only two years. There's a big difference between making a mistake that results in death and deliberate murder.

Posted by: Anonymoose 2010-11-06
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=309152