Image 01 Image 03
Sign In or RegisterLogout

Author: Andrew Branca

Profile photo

Andrew Branca

Andrew F. Branca is in his third decade of practicing law in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He wrote the first edition of the "Law of Self Defense" in 1997, and is currently in the process of completing the fully revised and updated second edition, which you can preorder now at lawofselfdefense.com. He began his competitive shooting activities as a youth in smallbore rifle, and today is a Life Member of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and a Life Member and Master-class competitor in multiple classifications in the International Defensive Pistol Association (IDPA). Andrew has for many years been an NRA-certified firearms instructor in pistol, rifle, and personal protection, and has previously served as an Adjunct Instructor on the Law of Self Defense at the SigSauer Academy in Epping, NH. He holds or has held concealed carry permits for Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Pennsylvania, Florida, Utah, Virginia, and other states.

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 09, 2015 135 Comments
Not many details on this yet but it appears that McKinney police officer Eric Casebolt has resigned from the police department, as reported by ABC news and others sources.
Casebolt's resignation was confirmed Tuesday by attorney Jane Bishkin, who told WFAA that the decision was made after a meeting with the department's internal affairs unit to review possible charges he could face.
Officer Casebolt came to public attention, of course, through his efforts to lawfully control a violent mob that invaded the quiet Texas community of McKinney this past Friday.  While controlling a non-compliant suspect Casebolt was charged by two males, at which point he drew his service pistol.  His assaulters fled upon seeing the drawn weapon and no shots were fired. For a detailed analysis of those events, see "Video Analysis: McKinney Brawl Another Rush to Misjudgment?" The same ABC news source also reports that:
Casebolt has not made any public statements since Friday's incident. His lawyer said he has been in hiding with his wife and family at an undisclosed location after they allegedly received death threats. (emphasis added)

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 09, 2015 72 Comments
Once again, Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby seems to be having difficulty grasping fundamentals of the practice of law. Indeed, she's now reduced to making exactly the same errors she only recently accused opposing counsel of making. In this most current instance, Mosby's motion for a gag order on the Freddie Gray case has been rejected, reports the Baltimore Sun (h/t Conservative Treehouse). The reason?  She filed her motion in Circuit Court on May 14, but while the matter was still jurisdictionally in the lower District Court.  The matter was not moved into Circuit Court until May 21, a week later. Ironically, in Mosby's motion opposing defense counsel's efforts to have her recuse herself from the case the Prosecutor argued that it was improper of the defense to make that argument in District Court, where the matter then rested, knowing as they did that the case would end up in District Circuit Court.

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 08, 2015 123 Comments
If you hadn't already heard the internet roar, there is outrage brewing at the use-of-force by police in McKinney, Texas. The biggest driver of outrage appears to be a ~13 minute cell phone video. Here's that video in its entirety, but I call out specific relevant portions below if you don't want to sit through the whole thing: I watched the video expectantly for the claimed police misconduct. One would think from Twitter comments regarding McKinney that the police dropped uninvited onto a placid pool party of little children to wreak havoc on the festivities. Is that what really happened?  Is that even vaguely credible? Nah. So what DID happen?

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 05, 2015 38 Comments
We're all familiar with the proverb, rats flee a sinking ship. To see this in action on a human scale we need look no further than the offices of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. In a story that's gotten remarkably little news coverage, the Baltimore Sun Times reports that four of the Mayor's highest ranking staff have quit since six Baltimore police officers were charged in the death of Freddie Gray. Among those who have resigned:

LeVar Michael, Head of the mayor's Office of Nonviolent Programs, resigned on Wednesday, May 20.

Angela Johnese, Director of the Criminal Justice Office, resigned on Friday, May 22.

Heather Brantner, Coordinator of the Mayor's Sexual Assault Response Team, also resigned on Friday, May 22. (Coincidence?)

Perhaps most shocking however, was the next resignation the following week:

Shannon Cosgrove, the Mayor's own Deputy Director, resigned Tuesday, May 26 (the day after Memorial Day.)

For those without a calendar in front of them, that's four high-level departures in a period of four business days.

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 04, 2015 42 Comments
Last November Cleveland Officer Timothy Loehmann shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a city park.  The investigation by law enforcement has now been completed, and the case is being handed over to prosecutors and a Grand Jury, reports CNN and other sources. The Cleveland police officers had been dispatched to the scene by 911 because of calls received that someone--ultimately determined to be Tamir Rice--was walking around the park pointing a gun at people. At least one call to 911 reported "a guy with a pistol" walking around the park. The same caller purportedly also told 911 that the gun was "probably" fake, but according to dispatch recordings released by law enforcement this additional information was not communicated to the responding officers.  Even if it had, no police officer could reasonably be expected to risk his life on the firearm identification skills of an anonymous caller to 911. Indeed, the surveillance video (below the fold, and annotated by the author) clearly shows Rice openly handling an apparent pistol (seemingly spinning it on his finger cowboy-style at the 1:20 mark), placing and removing it from his waistband (e.g., at 2:00 mark), and even apparently pointing the gun-like object at passersby. There are at least 10 occasions captured by the grainy footage of the surveillance video in which Rice is openly displaying the apparent gun in some fashion.  To an actual observer at the scene, the handling of the gun would have been far more apparent.

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 04, 2015 127 Comments
State Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who raised eyebrows (understatement maximus) when she abruptly charged six Baltimore police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, has now sought to seal Gray's autopsy report from the public. This is based on reporting by the Baltimore Sun, as brought to my attention by Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller. As reported in the Daily Caller piece, Ivan Bates, the attorney for the only female officer charged by Mosby's office in the case, is quoted as saying:
[Th]ere is something in that autopsy report that they are trying to hide. . . . It’s as if she wants to do everything to make sure our clients do not get a fair trial. . . . Nobody would know anything but the state and the defense, so they would totally hide it from the public. . . .  If your case is as good as you said it was, why don’t you just show the evidence? . . . You can’t holler and say, ‘I’m about accountability for the citizens,’ and then run around filing for a protective order.

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 03, 2015 29 Comments
One of the dominant theories of our time is that police officers are waging a Terminator-like war against unarmed young black men, killing them with a ruthlessness and determination evocative of a genocide, all the while escaping legal sanction. The Washington Post, certainly not a paper to shy away from fanning the flames of discord, seems to have stumbled upon some actual data on the subject.  Their reporting of this data is, as one might have expected, far richer in anecdote than analysis, but nevertheless the snippets of data that slip through are perhaps noteworthy. We start with a data point showing 385 police killings of suspects so far this year. Of these 385 killings, only about 25% involved a black suspect.  While it is certainly true that this 25% is disproportionate to the 13% or so of the US population that is black, it is also true that black suspects are disproportionately represented among those arrested for violent crime in general.

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 02, 2015 32 Comments
It looks like two members of the St. Louis Chapter of the New Black Panthers who planned multiple terrorist bombings around Ferguson, MO last year have been gifted a sweetheart plea deal from Obama's Department of Justice, based upon reports by Fox News/Associated Press and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Today Olajuwon Ali Davis (on left in the featured picture above) and Brandon Orlando Baldwin (aka Brandon Muhammad, on right in picture), both 22,  changed their plea of "not guilty" to accept a plea arrangement in which they will each serve 7 years in Federal prison. That means both men will be back on the street and free to continue terrorizing innocent people while still under the age of 30. If convicted of the charges initially brought against them they would each have faced decades in prison. The men were originally charged with plotting to kill Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch and then-Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson, and planning to blow up a Ferguson police station, police vehicles, and other area targets including (according to law enforcement sources) the famous St. Louis Gateway Arch monument. Their plan for the Arch was to plant a bomb on the observation deck.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 30, 2015 56 Comments
It took the Sparks NV jury fewer than 7 hours last night to find 74-year-old Wayne Burgarello not guilty of all charges in the shooting of two squatters, one of whom died of his injuries, reports the Reno Gazette Journal.  Burgarello had been charged with murder for the death he caused and was also subject to conviction on the lesser included charge of manslaughter; he was also charged with attempted murder for the victim who survived. Here's Burgarello leaving the courtroom following the verdict, in the company of his defense lawyer Theresa Ristenpart:

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 29, 2015 53 Comments
Fox host Megyn Kelly had a segment on last night in which she played video of public statements made by Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby regarding the Freddy Gray case In the video clip Mosby calls for "Justice, by any and all means necessary," echoing Malcolm X. And here's a few seconds of discussion of the subject between Kelly and Fox contributor Judge Napolitano:

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 28, 2015 37 Comments
I don't suppose it will ever end--the mainstream media will continue to cover trials involving deadly force, will continue to blindly label them Stand-Your-Ground cases, and will continue to demonstrate its utter ignorance of what Stand-Your-Ground actually is. The most recent example comes in the form of a Stand-Your-Ground piece written by a David Love, whose bio describes him as: "David A. Love is a writer based in Philadelphia. His work has appeared on CNN and been published by The Grio, The Progressive, and The Guardian." Looks impressive, no? Well, maybe the bio does. The piece on Stand-Your-Ground? Not so much. I realize that David is almost certainly not responsible for the headline of the post, but let's start there--after all, it's how the piece is introduced to the reading public. It's also where the piece goes immediately off the rails:  "These are the States That Have 'Stand Your Ground' Laws."  This point is then helpfully illustrated, literally, with a graphic image of the United States color coded to indicate which states qualify as "Stand-Your-Ground" states:  red-states are purportedly SYG, blue-states are purportedly non-SYG.  (That image is the featured pic at the top of this post. Interestingly, it was sourced in the Love's piece as being from al Jazeera.com.  Huh.) Before we dive into the errors of the illustrative map, however, let's take a moment to refresh our recollection on what Stand-Your-Ground actually means, legally speaking: it simply means that the state does not impose a legal duty on an otherwise lawful defender to make use of a safe avenue of retreat before they can use force in defense of themselves or another. Got it? Good. Now let's take a look at the 16 states indicated in the map as blue, and thus purportedly non-SYG that impose a legal duty retreat.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 23, 2015 34 Comments
In a case that somehow had not come on my radar screen, minutes ago Cleveland Police Officer Michael Brelo (who is white) was found not guilty by Judge John. P. O'Connell of all criminal charges resulting from his shooting of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams (who were both black). Brelo had been charged with two counts of voluntary manslaughter and two lesser included charges of felonious assault. This case was notable in that Russell and William had been reported as firing a shot at officers in front of a criminal justice center, then led numerous responding patrol cars on a high-speed (>100 miles per hour) 22-mile pursuit through the city of Cleveland. The pursuit ended in an adjacent city's school parking lot, at which point Russell began ramming the police vehicles with his car.  At that point the 13 officers at scene began firing at Russel and Williams. This firing lasted approximately 20 seconds, and during the last 8 of those seconds Officer Brelo would stand on the suspects' vehicle and fire a final 15 rounds through the windshield into their bodies.  In total the 13 officers fired 135 shots in this final altercation.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 23, 2015 33 Comments
This past Thursday Prosecutor Mosby announced that the Grand Jury had formally returned indictments against the six Baltimore officers charged in the death of Freddy Gray. In our post that afternoon (Freddie Gray Case: Baltimore Grand Jury Issues Indictments, published 5:50PM), we noted that there were some subtle differences between the charges returned by the Grand Jury and the charges originally publicly announced by Mosby on May 1. In particular, we made the two following observations (in bold-italic, emphasis added here):
Mosby’s May 1 charges had also included “False imprisonment (8th Amendment)”, and that has been dropped.  I see this as an implicit concession that Gray’s arrest was lawful, for the reasons we’ve previously espoused here Freddie Gray Case: Prosecutor Doubles Down On Wrong Law and here Confirmed – Freddie Gray’s Knife WAS Illegal and here Freddie Gray’s Knife – Why is Prosecutor Claiming Unlawful Arrest? Similarly, every one of the officers who was charged with “False imprisonment” by Mosby on May 1–meaning Rice, Nero, and Miller, the three arresting officers–has had that charge dropped by the Grand Jury. In its place has been added “Reckless endangerment (5 years), which I interpret as Mosby’s new “safe charge”–that is, the charge on which she hopes to get a conviction even after her case otherwise implodes for lack of evidence. It is notable that this “Reckless endangerment (5 years) has been added as a charge against each and every one of the six officers, none of whom were previously charged with this offense.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 22, 2015 20 Comments
I've long assumed that just about anything written by a journalist has only the most tenuous relationship to reality (see Michael Crichton's "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect"). Few news agencies are as skilled at the AP, however, at crafting headlines--often the only part of a story a casual reader notes--that communicate a narrative that's precisely the opposite of the underlying facts. As one example, here's a prevaricating AP headline from October 22, 2014: AP Isreali man shoots Palestinian In that case the actual facts turned out to be that the man shot was engaged in a terrorist attack on a bus stop, and had already managed to kill a 3-year-old before being engaged and stopped by Israeli police.  Replace the word"man" with "terrorist" and the headline would have accurately narrated the events.  Instead, the headline falsely implies an act of unjustified violence by Israeli authorities.  (In that case the AP withdrew the headline an hour in the face of considerable outrage.)

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 22, 2015 77 Comments
It doesn't look like I'm going to run out of "white cop shoots unarmed black man" stories to write about any time soon---except this time it was two black men. As always, please note the caveat that this shooting event is still developing, and all the "facts" in my possession are sourced from "journalists" and thus may have only a tenuous relationship to the truth. The reporting comes from The Olympian newspaper out of Washington.  It seems that an officer with the Olympia police department, 35-year-old Ryan Donald, scored multiple hits on two robbery suspects who decided they'd rather attack the officer than comply with lawful orders. Indeed, the two men---reportedly brothers---were apparently so determined to tangle with Officer Donald that even after he'd shot one of them and they'd both managed to successfully flee, they came back.  The second man was "shot multiple times in the torso." The police department reports that Donald immediately set about providing first aid and called for emergency medical response.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 21, 2015 92 Comments
UPDATE: We have additional information on the specific charges specified in the Grand Jury indictments, and how they differ from the charges announced by Prosecutor Mosby on May 1. Here's video of Mosby's press statement on the charges, at which she took  no questions: Clarification on changes to "false imprisonment" charges: Below we note that the "False imprisonment (8th Amendment)" charges are not present on a written list of the Grand Jury's charges (embedded below), and we speculate that this may be an implicit concession that the arrest of Gray was lawful. Shortly thereafter I were provided with the video of Mosby reading the charges, above. In the video the "False imprisonment" charges she specified in her May 1 allegations against the officers are also gone. It seems however, based on her verbal reading, that she has replaced that "False imprisonment (8th Amendment)" charge with a "Misconduct in office for illegal arrest (8th Amendment)". It's unclear if this represents a substantive alteration in the charges. For purposes of transparency I'll leave my earlier speculation intact below, but flag it with reference to this clarification. The officers are now scheduled to be arraigned on July 2, according to Mosby's read press statement.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 21, 2015 118 Comments
This past Monday the office of Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby filed a motion in opposition to an earlier defense motion (oofah, lawyers) requesting that charges against six Baltimore police officers be dismissed, or alternatively, that Mosby recuse herself from the case. We covered the defense motion for dismissal/recusal in detail in a previous post, here:  Freddie Gray Case: Detailed Analysis of Motion to Recuse Prosecutor. Mosby's motion in opposition (embedded at the bottom of this post) is remarkable for a number of reasons, most substantially for it's epic levels of projection. In the motion's second sentence it claims that the defense motion is "born of desperation" and "the desire for publicity," and in the third sentence that the defense motion is "spewing invective" and "casting aspersions," ultimately concluding that the defense motion "bounces from one ridiculous allegation to another, like a pinball on a machine far past 'TILT.'"
Accessibility by WAH