Criminal charges in police shooting case must be dropped

I am white. I am an attorney. I am offended by Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney Jon Tunheim’s decision to charge the young men shot by Olympia police Officer Ryan Donald. I must speak out.

As a lawyer I am trained to distill facts down to their most narrow context. An incident occurred; it involved specific people, engaged in specific acts at a specific time. What happened in the moment is all that drives the charging decisions. Just the facts. No need for context. No need to understand the circumstances that give rise to the facts. Just an assessment of who did what, when, with what motivation and by what means.

The prosecutor is invested with great discretion to charge or not to charge, and this is the logic of the world in which he exercised it.

But the logic of the legal world is limited and too often fails to do justice. It often ignores context. That is what happened here. We know from all too many authentic sources (including for me, my son) that when a black man is presented with the power and authority of law enforcement — especially white law enforcement — he understands intuitively and emotionally that he is facing someone who is at once judge and jury and, at the same time, has the power to impose a death sentence in the moment.

He does not need to know the names and numbers of those who have gone before him (Trayvon, Michael, Eric, etc.); he just knows that they have and he is likely to be next. Fear reigns and colors everything about the interaction with the authority figure. Too often, as in this case, it causes the very escalation that results in tragedy.

In his haste to apply the law to the facts, Mr. Tunheim dehumanized the victims of Officer Donald’s gun violence. He spoke of them as an afterthought, effectively wiping these two young men beyond the circle of human concern. He offered no acknowledgment of the human tragedy that occurred; no empathy or compassion. He pretended that the fact of their racial identity and their physical and emotional trauma were nonissues. His words and charging decisions made clear that, in his mind, these young black men deserved what they got. For many, he confirmed black experience that white people in positional authority have a different understanding of the value of life; and that black lives really do not matter.

Much is wrong here. The law, the process, the context, the protocol that allowed an officer to engage without support, and the willingness to accept effectively coached statements but disregard statements of others who witnessed the event.

Most difficult to swallow is the lack of empathy and the corresponding unwillingness of a white prosecuting attorney to view Andre Thompson and Bryson Chaplin as fellow human beings caught in a terrible tragedy. Justice demands that charges be dropped immediately.

This story was originally published September 20, 2015 at 5:01 PM with the headline "Criminal charges in police shooting case must be dropped."