Police make mistakes but seldom admit them

Connecticut has seen quite a few fatal shootings by police officers over the last decade. Most occurred in urgent response to serious crimes and could not be impartially challenged. The officers were plainly heroes, shooting only when their lives or the lives of others were at imminent risk.

But the shooting of Jashon Bryant, 18, by Hartford Officer Robert R. Lawlor in 2005, just prosecuted in Hartford Superior Court, had to be challenged. It was a close case and Lawlor is lucky to have been acquitted of manslaughter and assault.

For Lawlor, now retired, was not investigating any crime in progress, and his defense was only that he thought he saw a gun in the hands of one of two young men sitting in a car parked in a lot off Main Street in Hartford one night. As Lawlor approached, the car sped off and he shot at it, instantly killing Bryant and wounding the driver, Brandon Henry, 21. In speeding off, the car did not aim for Lawlor or the federal agent accompanying him, and no gun or other weapon was ever found in the area.

The young men were black and Lawlor is white, as were all the jurors who acquitted him, and so racial suspicions have been raised. But race adds little to the criticism here. The only rationale for deadly force was in the officer’s mind ­— if he was telling the truth.

The jury was not convinced that he was lying. What happened might have been manslaughter, but it was not proved to the jury’s satisfaction, and the recklessness of the young men in speeding away could not help but give credibility to the officer who shot at them. Engaging police in pursuit is not a capital crime, but it is a crime and people attempting it are asking for trouble, if only because it may give police an excuse if not a reason to shoot from anger or nerves rather than defense.

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The Lawlor case resembles the case of former New Milford police Officer Scott Smith, who was convicted of manslaughter by a Superior Court jury in the December 1998 fatal shooting of a petty criminal, Franklyn Reid. When the state Appellate Court granted Smith a new trial on the grounds that more expert testimony should have been heard, he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of criminally negligent homicide, was given a suspended sentence and was barred from future police work.

Smith’s rationale for shooting was even weaker than Lawlor’s. The evidence was that Smith saw Reid on the street, recognized him as someone wanted for failure to appear in court, called to him to stop, and, when Reid instead ran, chased him on foot, caught him on an embankment, and had him lying on the ground, unresisting, with arms spread out, with Smith’s foot on Reid’s back, when the officer shot him. Smith claimed to have thought that Reid was reaching for a weapon. A folding knife was found in the pocket of Reid’s jacket, but it was zippered up.

Some observers of the Smith case thought a more likely explanation was that the officer’s gun had a hair trigger and the shooting had been accidental. Whatever, failure to appear in court is not any more capital of a crime than engaging police in pursuit is, and the jury did not believe Smith. The jury thought that manslaughter had been proved, and the officer made a plea bargain rather than seek vindication in a second trial.

To settle the corresponding civil lawsuit, New Milford paid Reid’s survivors $1.6 million in damages. Hartford now is being sued by Bryant’s survivors and may have to pay heavily as well.

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In a recent newspaper essay, a retired state prosecutor, John M. Massameno, wrote that he was appalled by the Lawlor and Smith cases and argued that Connecticut should have a law instructing juries reviewing shootings by police that there is a greater chance that force will be used against officers than against others and that officers have been trained accordingly. “The law,� Massameno wrote, “should not criminalize officers’ good-faith mistakes in judgment.�

Maybe not. But prior to his plea bargain, Smith never acknowledged any mistake, and upon his acquittal the other day Lawlor left the courthouse insisting again that he had done what he had to do and refusing demands for an apology from the family of the young man he killed.

Yes, like everyone else, police will make good-faith mistakes, and some of those mistakes will have horrible consequences. But police in Connecticut are not yet famous for admitting serious mistakes, and unless serious mistakes are admitted, the criminal law may seem like the better part of redress.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.