Very few cops ever start their day hoping to kill someone. Most times a police officer draws his weapon, it\u2019s under duress, with only seconds to make a very tough decision. Most times, most cops get it right.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s also possible for a cop to be high on steroids, or to act like an aggressive bully who has to be \u201cin charge\u201d at all times, to make mistakes, to kill people by accident through bad trigger control, or by escalating a situation into violence unnecessarily.<\/p>\n
Clark County\u2019s \u201ccoroner\u2019s inquest\u201d process is highly controversial because it almost always results in police officers being found blameless in the shooting deaths of local citizens — a result, primarily, of prescribed jury instructions which require such a finding unless the jury believes police officers acted \u201cwith criminal intent,\u201d leaving no room for the jury to rule that officers\u2019 conduct was, for example, unreasonable, causing death unnecessarily, that said officer or officers might therefore appropriately face some consequence short of a murder charge, possibly including removal from the force.<\/p>\n
But, while plenty of the police conduct examined in past inquests has been alarming — look up the deaths of Henry Rowe, John Perrin, and Orlando Barlow, for starters — last week\u2019s inquest into the shooting death of West Point graduate Erik Scott by three Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officers in broad daylight outside a Summerlin Costco store where he had been shopping earlier this summer may be the highest-profile proceedings of its kind in the valley\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
You\u2019d think those in charge of the inquest process, therefore, would have wanted to be on their best behavior in setting this one up. Many expected the inquest to be a sham, of course, \u201cclearing\u201d the officers as a preliminary to the Scott family filing a civil lawsuit and winning hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars to be paid up not by Metro or the department\u2019s individual cops, but by the taxpayers — the usual outcome.<\/p>\n
And yet, they did it again.<\/p>\n
The Erik Scott coroner\u2019s inquest was not open to the public.<\/p>\n
Sheriff Doug Gillespie visited us here at the Review-Journal offices on Aug. 3. He acknowledged the importance of an open-to-the-public inquest process to maintain public confidence in that process, and in his department. \u201cI\u2019m not lookin\u2019 at hidin\u2019 anything, nor is my organization,\u201d the sheriff said. That\u2019s why they were going to hold the Erik Scott inquest in the largest available courtroom, so all who wanted to attend could do so, the sheriff vowed.<\/p>\n
But that turned out to be the usual pile of crap.<\/p>\n
The coroner\u2019s inquest got underway at 10:50 a.m. Wednesday morning, Sept. 22, the first day of Autumn, at the downtown Regional Justice Center. I was there.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you a lawyer?\u201d the uniformed officer at the metal detector asked me, as usual, probably because I wear a necktie.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, I\u2019m not a lawyer.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen take off your belt.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once I was through all the \u201cwanding\u201d rigmarole, I tried to find the Scott inquest on the big docket board, knowing it ought to be listed in courtroom 16.<\/p>\n
I finally gave up and asked at the information desk.<\/p>\n
They told me it was in ground floor courtroom 1-B, a courtroom big enough to hold 75 to 80 people.
\nI entered courtroom 1-B, where about 15 people were watching the proceedings, which were just getting underway, on a closed circuit video screen.<\/p>\n
I trooped back to the information desk.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re just watching the proceedings on TV in there,\u201d I said. \u201cI want to attend the actual inquest. Is that in courtroom 16?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly invited people can get in there, it\u2019s not open to the public,\u201d said the older guy in the red checked shirt.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you kidding me?\u201d I asked, taking out a pen and writing down his precise words. \u201cWhat\u2019s your name?\u201d
\nThe man at the information desk refused to give his name. I asked him to call the head of security for the building. He phoned someone named \u201cGeorge,\u201d who never showed up, although I stood there tapping my foot for more than 12 minutes by the clock.<\/p>\n
I finally took the elevator up to courtroom 16-D. I made it through the first set of doors but was then told to leave by a cadre of four armed \u201cmarshalls,\u201d before I got through the second set of doors. The one whose nameplate said \u201cLemke\u201d told me all the seats were full. I said \u201cNo problem, I\u2019ll wait till someone leaves, and then take that seat.\u201d<\/p>\n
Marshall Lemke replied: \u201cThere might be some seats open after the voir dire, but the coroner will decide who gets them, they may not be first come first served, open to the public.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOK, let me talk to the coroner,\u201d i said.<\/p>\n
He wouldn\u2019t let me talk to the coroner.<\/p>\n
Courtroom 16-D, from the brief look I got at it, would appear to be a normal-sized \u201cupstairs\u201d courtroom at the downtown Justice Center, which means it could hold about 32 people, not including the judge, jury, and active attorneys. There were perhaps eight people hanging around in the hallway outside. Add the 15 folks watching on TV downstairs and you get 55 people who were interested in attending the proceedings ion Wednesday morning, Sept. 22.<\/p>\n
In other words, ground floor courtroom 1-B, which was open and available, could easily have held everyone who wanted to attend this so-called \u201cpublic\u201d inquest, with at least 20 seats to spare.<\/p>\n
So why wasn\u2019t the inquest opened up to the public, by holding it in the largest available courtroom — possibly courtroom 1-B — as Sheriff Gillespie promised?<\/p>\n
Sure enough, those of us who ended up watching part of the proceedings downstairs on TV (we couldn\u2019t see the jury, or much of anything else other than the judge and one witness at a time) saw Justice of the Peace Tony Abbatangelo, the convicted wife-beater who was running this proceeding, look into the camera and announce — just I knew he would — that if any member of the public had any \u201cpersonal and direct\u201d information and wanted to come forward and testify, they should approach his marshalls with that information, blah blah blah.<\/p>\n
Anyone at home watching on the county\u2019s TV channel could have gotten the impression Abbatangelo was addressing a huge courtroom full of members of \u201cthe public.\u201d But he wasn\u2019t, of course. Once again, as always, the proceedings \u201cweren\u2019t open to the public,\u201d according to men with guns on their hips. It was \u201cinvited guests only!\u201d<\/p>\n
Wednesday\u2019s proceedings dealt primarily with the deceased Erik Scott\u2019s use of prescription pain killers, with prosecutors cross-examining his doctors as though they were there to prosecute the deceased, rather than examine the conduct of his killers. Medical Examiner Alane Olson did note, however, that the deceased was shot seven times, five times in the back, with one bullet entering \u201cthe underside of the buttocks\u201d and penetrating up through his bowels and bladder.<\/p>\n
That is to say, that one of our proud boys in beige shot Erik Scott from behind, in the butt, after he was face-down on the ground, already dying with at least two rounds of .40-caliber through his heart.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s OK; they\u2019ll all be cleared of any wrongdoing, in that secret little courtroom to which members of the public aren\u2019t admitted, because Sheriff Doug Gillespie isn\u2019t \u201clookin\u2019 at hidin\u2019 anything, nor is my organization.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why he vowed the Erik Scott coroner\u2019s inquest would be held in the largest available courtroom, so anyone who wanted to could attend. Remember?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Very few cops ever start their day hoping to kill someone. Most times a police officer draws his weapon, it\u2019s under duress, with only seconds to make a very tough decision. Most times, most cops get it right. But it\u2019s also possible for a cop to be high on steroids, or to act like an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-due-process","category-nevada"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-9E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=598"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":599,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions\/599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}