EDITORIAL
EYE ON ARKANSAS
Still untruthful “Regardless of your personal belief, I would hope that stopping atrocities against little babies is something that we can agree to put an end to.” — U.S. Rep. Kristi Noern, R-S.D., speaking in the House on behalf of an anti-abortion bill. r to put it another way, as Rep. Noern might have said, “Regardless of your personal belief, I would hope that you shutting up about your personal belief and letting me decide these things is something we can all agree to.” Rep. Noern was disappointed in that regard. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., responded to her by saying that the bill Noern supported was “yet another attempt to endanger women. It is disrespectful to women, it is unsafe for families and it is unconstitutional.” Nonetheless, the bill passed the House, 228-196, and sailed on to certain defeat in the Senate. All four of Arkansas’s U.S. representatives, all of them Republican, voted for the bill, predictably. In support of bad legislation, they move together like synchronized swimmers. As is customary with anti-abortion bills and their supporters, Rep. Noern was less than honest in her presentation. After the usual chaff about “atrocities” and “murders,” she didn’t dwell on the fact that the bill subjects doctors found guilty to up to five years in prison, but imposes no criminal penalty on their patients. If abortion is really murder, one would expect that the person who initiated and arranged the murder, who transported the “victim” to the “hit man,” would be punished at least as severely. That is how murder for hire is treated in other aspects of our criminal justice system. But the supporters of anti-abortion legislation, Reps. Noern, Crawford, Griffin, Womack and Cotton among them, know the American people wouldn’t stand for execution of women already suffering from their decision to have an abortion. So the supporters of the legislation have to lie about it. Again and again.
Undisciplined
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n reflection, we may have overstated the case in describing the Arkansas delegation of the House of Representatives as looking like a synchronized swimming team in its enthusiastic yet precise support of bad bills. Occasionally, one spots the ostentatious leg sticking out of the water at an inappropriate time. That would be Rep. Tom Cotton of Dardanelle, a flighty sort. It’s not that he doesn’t want to do wrong, it’s that he sometimes has difficulty identifying the greater wrong so that he can get behind it. The conventional wisdom in Arkansas and in Washington was that loyal Republicans should support the farm bill. Most Republicans fell loyally into line, including Arkansas’s Crawford, Griffin and Womack. Cotton voted against it, following the wishes of the deep-pocketed, hard-hearted anti-tax groups that give him money. Although the bill cut food stamps, which help feed poor people, it didn’t cut the stamps as much as Cotton and his friends would like. Cotton evidently believes he can prosper politically by voting against poor people in a poor state. With an inattentive electorate, it’s worked before. 6
JUNE 27, 2013
ARKANSAS TIMES
BRIAN CHILSON
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MISTRIAL: Former Little Rock police officer Josh Hastings walks into the Pulaski County Courthouse on Sunday. A circuit court jury was unable to reach a verdict in the manslaughter trial of Hastings for his fatal shooting of Bobby Moore, 15, last August.
When a cop kills
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Pulaski circuit court jury hung 10-2 in favor of a negligent homicide conviction for former Little Rock Police Officer Josh Hastings, who gunned down the driver of a car on an apartment complex parking lot last August while investigating car burglaries. Hastings wasn’t sure who was in the car, though he had some reason to believe it was car burglars. He also told a story about the shooting that — based on expert testimony and testimony from the dead 15-year-old driver’s companions — seemed inconsistent with the facts. A majority of the jury saw it that way, we know from reporting by the Times’ David Koon. They didn’t think Hastings was in danger from the car. They think he acted recklessly. They considered it all carefully over two days and favored conviction on a lesser charge of negligent homicide — Hastings also was charged with a more serious manslaughter charge — was appropriate. But two female holdouts opposed any conviction from the first. By one juror’s account, they simply couldn’t get past Hastings badge. The holdouts reportedly said that Hastings had prevented future crimes by killing Bobby Moore, 15. I shouldn’t need to tell you that this isn’t a legal justification for use of deadly force — prophylactic execution. Bobby Moore had a nasty police record at a young age. His juvenile companions were offenders, too. Defense Attorney Bill James managed to make much of that, though he had been instructed not to do so by the judge and was fined $25,000 for contempt of court for ignoring the order to shut up about juvenile records. The prosecution — in its first prosecution of a police killing in my 40 years in Little Rock — followed the rules. It did not, because it legally could not, introduce abundant evidence of Hastings poor work. He was fired not only for failing to follow department rules on use of deadly force in this shooting. He also was fired for inadequate
response to an unrelated burglary and for not telling the truth to supervisors about it. He’d also been suspended six times in five years for offenses ranging from sleeping on duty, to leaving his MAX patrol area, to failure to appear BRANTLEY as a witness at scheduled court maxbrantley@arktimes.com hearings. I saw positives in the mistrial. A white cop shot a young black thug in the dark of night and trotted out the tried-and-true police defense that he was threatened. But the police and prosecutor did a thorough investigation and filed charges. An all-white jury then came within a hair of conviction. Even some law-and-order types conceded — while shedding few tears for the dead youth — that Hastings’ judgment was questionable and some said they believed that his father’s position as an admired police captain undoubtedly gave young Josh an edge in the department on previous troubles. The prosecution will retry the case. Whatever the outcome, Hastings is unlikely to get his job back. That, by the way, will be a decision fully supported by his record, not a reaction to the current legal controversy over allegations of racially unequal treatment of both cops and suspects by the LRPD. The reported attitude of the holdout jurors indicates how thin the blue line is between the law and vigilante justice. Cases like Hastings’ — prosecution for use of deadly force — are rare. Not rare are garden variety police rousts of equally unpleasant suspects in the dark of night. These should always get the same rigorous review that the Hastings case received. Cops who disrespect the boundaries of the law should get no more leniency than teenage carjackers. Happily, at least 10 Pulaski County jurors demonstrated this week that they believe that.