February 4, 2023

Hey, guys. Seth Fuller, your favorite attorney in your Texas trial champion. Here to talk about the Tyree Nichols murder beating, anger, police brutality, whatever you want to call it. If you don't know already, Tyree Nichols is a young black man out of Memphis who was beaten to death by the Memphis Police Department or allegedly beaten to death.

Thus far, five black officers have been charged with his death and have been fired from the Memphis Police Department. Now, they were a member of this elite group called S.C.O.R.P.I.O.N.S. , which is something about fighting street crimes for promoting peace. I don't remember what it stands for, but there's peace in there. And street crimes. Definitely a throwback to the C.R.A.S.H. days of L.A., which was like a criminal response to street hoodlums.

I mean, whatever, you know, it's they're all nice little anagrams, I guess. Scorpions. Pretty cool. Sounds cool. But a lot of you watched the video. If you haven't already, DONT. It's pretty brutal.

Essentially, Tyre Nichols runs off from a traffic stop for (maybe) reckless driving. There's seems to be little evidence of bad driving. This elite police unit chases him down on foot, catching him on the street corner and, under the watchful eye of their cameras that are supposed to prevent crime (and, by the way, they are working based on them catching this crime). The police are ostensibly trying to get Tyre in handcuffs, but basically, they just keep beating him. At one point they're holding him while one of them's punching him in the face, tasing him several times, pepper spraying over and over again, to the point they're pepper spraying themselves. And the police chief looks at it and said it was a "failing of basic humanity," which is an understatement. Made Rodney King look like an Avengers movie.

And here we are, 30, 40 years later, and we are still dealing with the same issues. The main difference, seemingly, is that in this case, all the officers that are charged are black. One white officer is filed and may be charged. And so the whole racial thing becomes a whole different topic. But in any event, as a criminal defense lawyer, I wanted to talk quickly about the brutality from Memphis PD.

And I'm not going to talk long because I've previously discussed police brutality and this didn't change anything except the color of the officers, and while the remnants of slavery and racism and all that stuff come into play with the types of people the police are running into, the attitudes they have towards those people who is committing crimes, who is in street gangs, we can see here, that it isn't necessarily the main factor in a lot of these police-civilian altercations. Now, the great thing about this is it's opening up this conversation that we really need to have, that we really need to flesh out, which is what is the line that police are supposed to take?

A lot of this comes from the criminalization of everything, as I call it. These days anything can be a felony. So if you make a rule where police aren't supposed to chase you or engage in physical unless you commit a felony, well, then what's a felony?

Well, fleeing from the police in a vehicle is a felony. So if you refuse to stop for 5 seconds, even if you don't drive fast or anything like that, can they say, oh, he was fleeing in a vehicle, a felony. Is that enough to then beat you? But if we base it on how physical the police, the, civilian, and the person, their arresting the arrestee is being, then what's the line?

In this case, Tyre seemed to, at very at the very most, be just trying to stand up and get away from these officers. Now, that's not okay. It's against the law to flee from officers who are trying to arrest you. Of that there is no doubt, which is why kind of we get here. But then again, when someone is is is just not complying, which is what we're talking about, noncompliance, it becomes a huge issue with a lot of grey areas.

What's the line? What do we want our police, who we the taxpayers pay, to do? First off, we have to look at this reasonable. We need reasonable guidelines in place so that police officers can know when they're crossing the line. I know, that seems silly. Just be a human for god's sake. Sorry, that's not how it works. When you have adrenaline involved, when you have ego involved, when you have these people that they've run into before, when all of these things get involved, you can't just say, "oh, yeah, you know, use your best judgment." We really need to have a reasonable conversation before we have this pendulum swing that's going to be happening.

This isn't the most egregious video we've seen. There's the Shaver video where a guy was shot dead trying to pull his shorts up, crawling and begging for his life in a Las Vegas hallway. There was the shooting of Ryan Whitaker, who is shot trying to put his gun down when he answered the door in his rough neighborhood to the police, who have been called on a complaint that wasn't valid at all. That man was shot dead in the doorway in front of his girlfriend and then blamed, even though he was clearly putting his gun on the ground when shot. You have Tamir Rice was just playing in the park with a toy gun. Just playing with the toy gun and he got shot dead in like few seconds. They just showed up and shot him.

These instances were never okay to me. And I'll say it time and time again. These, among others, are never going to be okay. And you can't explain it to me. I've looked at the videos. You can't use bias and confirmation bias to then say "Oh, look, Whitaker, you know, could have they could see the gun. So he could have been doing something." No, he was putting the gun down. He's a civilian who answered his door and is putting the gun down. Shaver is trying to pull his pants up. Tamir was playing with his toy gun in the park. The problem is we have given the police in these incidents the benefit of the doubt and essentially do nothing or a jury finds them not guilty because they give them the benefit of the doubt.

Why? Because we make police heroes and we don't give them the correct guidelines to where we can then say "hey, police, here's the line. If you cross this line and somebody dies, you're going to be charged with manslaughter. If you cross this line and somebody dies, you can be charged with criminally negligent homicide. Cross this line, and somebody ends up in the hospital or is hurt, you're going to be charged with official oppression or assault or aggravated assault, whatever fits." We need to have a line here where we can say "these are the types of things we want you to fight for, and these are not."

Where I think the line is being drawn all the way back to Rodney King and through every one of these cases is that there has to be pretty clear evidence that the person is being physical towards police officers or towards someone else. The reason we need these guidelines is that at one point it was definitely okay to beat someone for noncompliance.

These dash cams, these overhead videos are for sure changing where that line is drawn. But until we make it clear line, we can have this pendulum of back and forth where police are getting off for clearly murdering someone and then being prosecuted for murder for a clear accident, and we're going to have this swing until we can have a solid line where good cops can point to that line and have something in their brain where they don't have to worry about being prosecuted for when somebody is just not doing what they ask them to do is breaking the law clearly in front of them and all they're trying to do is get handcuffs on that person. That does happen.

The Tyree Nichols video was brutal, just like the Rodney King was. But the Rodney King video, I think, got a little bit worse, strike-count-wise, but he lived. I've seen tons of MMA and combat sports fights where someone takes a way, way, way, way worse beating for like 10 minutes and still came out alive and conscious.

What I'm saying is we're going to have trouble with these prosecutions, these police officers with, you know, stacked bodies written on their AR dust cover. They are going to go free because we don't have an idea and a jury is not going to want to prosecute someone for a serious crime who they're like, "you know what? We think maybe this was just a cop who wasn't given clear instructions and was doing his job as entailed to him in the training in the instruction."

And more importantly, the most important part of it is as applied in front of their supervisors and in front of their trainers in the field and as modeled by the other officers who've been there longer, by the veteran officers and by their trainers. Okay. And so for sure, there is a pendulum swing where we are giving kids cops the benefit of the doubt.

And we needed video proof of something egregious happened. And the first one I remember is the I think it was a Philadelphia police officer who shot a guy who is running away from child support payments and he shot him and then kicked the Taser over and made up a story. Now, that guy was that police officer was successful, successfully prosecuted, and spent time in jail.

Not enough time. Mine, but the cameras are changing things. And we're having this pendulum where some of these juries and police departments and stuff are giving people the benefit of the doubt. And some of them aren't. But now that we have videos that are clear that are showing this clearly, what it does is it makes us think back to all those ones that weren't on the video like Mike Brown.

Hands up, don't shoot. Where it said that he reached for a gun, but there's no video. And so when we see these that are on video that we go, whoa, that's happening. And it doesn't match a piece of what the police officer said. Man, when I read these police reports in my criminal clients' cases, oh, my goodness, you would not believe how different the police report is from what actually happened.

In fact, you wouldn't believe what the main police report says. The arrest can be so different from a police report written by the same person later. But it's bananas. And this can result in things like, oh, they were committing robbery when they were committing a burglary of a vehicle with no one around. And they're saying, well, they were committing robbery.

And then you could use that, as you could see in the Tyree Tyree Nichols videos at the second release video where the police are talking or the third released video excuse me, where the police are talking about, oh, he was recklessly he ran from he reached for my gun. You can look at that video. It doesn't seem like they're reaching for the gun.

But what that does is put in our minds, how long have they been like how many these cases where we gave the police the benefit of the doubt? Were there gross things going on with the policemen just like we'll never know. We will never know. You and I will never know. But when we look at these videos, we get some clues.

That is definitely not 0% of the time these cops were lying or these cops stepped over the line, or crossed the line into committing a crime. And again, I think we have to look very closely at fostering the brotherhood of police work because we need that in order for these people to protect us. Well, if you live in downtown Chicago or inside the south side of Chicago, I think you live in a bad if you live in Schirach, you want the police there doing these things.

You want them because you can go look at videos from San Francisco. You can go look in videos from Chicago, go look and videos and from a lot of these cities, Dallas, where these these these criminals are doing things very dangerous to the public, whether it's spinning donuts in the middle of a crowded intersection with people just standing around or, you know, shooting off guns.

And then they'll just get away with it because the police are like, we're underfunded. Where we're undermanned. I don't want to do this, chase, and I'm just going to ignore it. But on the flip side, we have this where this crack team of people decides that this guy who is driving a little recklessly maybe should be chased down and beaten if he doesn't comply and so this is the line we need to establish.

And I think we can establish that line. But I think it needs to be a conversation in each community and on a national scale. And we can't let the fringes, the people on the edges, the guys who are like, oh, whatever, these who knew? I didn't do not are just trying to take advantage. You know, the guy who gets killed is grandma saying poor guy he's robbed three separate places on it the gun and then the other side who's saying, oh, all cops are bastards.

And you can't, you can't. The policeman shouldn't be able to arrest it. You know, we can't have those two things, but we can reach them. We can reach in the middle, us in the middle. The citizens who really don't want to see either side happen need to find a common middle ground so we can give these police departments a line where they cross it.

They're getting charged. And I think that line can be a reasonable line. And I think the key to this, as I've said in other videos, is that the line has to be at a place where it gives them the benefit of doubt. But once they cross it, everybody has to know. It has to be probably written into the law or at least written into the police manual, that if they cross it, they are facing serious consequences.

They don't get that benefit of the doubt anymore. The benefit of the doubt is written into until this point we won't charge you. But if you cross this line and disobey this, this is when you will have charges and the jury is going to be told you were given a clear line. And that way the jury is more likely not to give you the benefit of the doubt.

And that's the best way to have these trials be fair, where we don't have a Rodney King outcome, where we don't have a shaver outcome, where we have, I would say it Amber Guyger outcome where the people that the jury can be fair because this is the line that you crossed. And that line was different than what a citizen's line would be.

But be that because you were a police officer, but once you cross it, all bets are off and you're treated like someone who broke the law, like a regular citizen, like the guy you beat to death. And by doing that, I really do think we can change these police departments and we can have a new environment where the police can do their work and feel confident doing their work, but also not cross the line and violate people's constitutional rights and not hurt people.

In any event, that's my whole breakdown of the tire. NICHOLS Well, I guess I'd better say whether I think they'll be successfully prosecuted. Yeah, I think these cops will probably end up being prosecuted for something akin to criminally negligent homicide, that's my guess. And that maybe a couple of them are going to get off who didn't, like really hit them or anything.

So I think maybe you'll have maybe at least 2 to 3 convictions and then two non-convictions. I wouldn't be completely surprised if they got no convictions and then I guess people are going to riot. But now I get I hope we don't call them race riots because everyone involved is African-American. In any event. That's my prediction. That's my breakdown.

Go watch my other videos. If you want a more clear, more concise view of how I feel about police officers. If you're like, Oh, he's a bootlegger, he's is this liberal? Do you think police should be disbanded? No, I'm very reasonable. I love the police. I think they are necessary. But I. I also am friends with a lot of really good police officers, so I'm probably a little harder on the crappy police officers because as a criminal defense attorney, I see the terrible things that happen when they are allowed to run free and violate the constitutional rights of others.

If you are arrested or come across this, you can contact me. I'm your Texas trial champion, Seth Fuller. Better call Seth and please subscribe to my social media.