October 18, 2009

Taser Grand Jury: Jamaal Valentine (LaMarque TX)


The LaMarque Police Department officers who killed 27-year old Jamaal Valentine with a Taser gun aren't responsible for his death, according to a Galveston County Grand Jury. [SOURCE]

Police officers fired their taser guns at Valentine on the night of May 17 after they found him rolling in a ditch. Valentine was arrested but immediately fell ill, so he was transported to a hospital, where he died of heart failure, according to a police statement. But an autopsy performed on his body detected the presence of a controlled substance in his system.

"The applicable law in any criminal case, is that a person is criminally responsible for a result, if the result would not have occurred but for the actors conduct, operating either alone or concurrently with another cause, unless the concurrent cause was clearly sufficient to produce the result and the conduct of the actor clearly insufficient," according to the statement.
Villager's Voice: I had to read the paragraph above a number of times. My take is that the powers-that-be are telling us that this young brother died because of the "controlled substance in his system" and the fact that 50,000 volts of electricity was pumped through his body by the police taser gun was "clearly insufficent". These taser-related deaths won't stop until police are held accountable. These LaMarque police officers are home-free. None of them are facing grand jury charges of murder, manslaughter, criminal negligent homicide or official oppression. When will the powers-that-be do something about these taser-related deaths?

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