now they need to move on to the other bastards involved in this.
Last week, federal prosecutors announced that former Georgia deputy
Nikki Autry would be indicted on charges of making false statements to a judge in order to obtain a warrant to raid a home in Habersham County.
During that raid, one deputy blindly deployed a flash grenade that
landed in a playpen, critically injuring a toddler.
Lied to get a warrant. Why? Why did she think it so damned important to put on the ninja suits and charge in? The team just get such a charge out of it that they didn't care about anything else?
According to the indictment, Autry is charged with four counts of civil
rights violations for “willfully depriving the occupants of the
residence of their right to be free from unreasonable searches and
seizures.”
Where's the charge for lying under oath?
And let's not forget Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell and the DA who cleared the team of any wrongdoing just as fast as they could. And the rest of the bullshit involved:
Now the blame will likely shift to Autry, who has since resigned. If the
allegations are true, certainly she deserves some blame. But even if
Autry lied, the rest of the raid team and Terrell are still culpable.
They clearly did no corroborating investigation before commencing with a
violent, no-knock raid on innocent people.
...
But more broadly, the suspect himself was arrested at another residence, without a SWAT team and without incident. He clearly wasn’t the violent threat the officers had claimed him to be. So why deploy the commando tactics in the first place? Why not use less aggressive tactics, such as waiting for the suspect to leave, surrounding a house and calling the suspect out? If history is any indication, that’s a question Georgia officials probably aren’t going to ask. They didn’t ask it after Kathryn Johnston died. Or David Hooks. Or after numerous similar incidents..
There’s one more lesson to be learned here. Terrell isn’t the only
official who cleared these officers. District Attorney Brian Rickman did
too, as did a grand jury. So did the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
How is it that the sheriff, the DA, a grand jury and the state police
all looked into this, and none of them found what the feds found — that this entire raid was based on a series of lies?
Probably because they didn't want to find that out.
Why yes, I am cynical about this.
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