BadLawyer sums it up:
It’s interesting that local men and women who sat through the trial, heard the evidence, and the testimony of Mr. Ersland felt compelled under the Oklahoma law to find the pharmacist guilty but are now vilified by their family and neighbors.
Maybe there are problems with the jury instructions in this case (not that I know one way or the other,) but these Oklahoma jurors were serious-minded folks doing the job required of them under the law. Criticizing them without seeing or hearing the evidence is moronic.
Yet the jurors in the murder trial of Jerome Jay Ersland in Oklahoma City were under assault, as everyone else, all those otherwise nice men and women, called them bad names for getting it wrong. From the Oklahoman :
Jerome Jay Ersland, 59, was found guilty May 26 of first-degree murder for shooting a wounded robber five more times inside a south Oklahoma City pharmacy. Jurors rejected the Chickasha man’s claim that he was defending himself and two female co-workers.
Thousands have criticized the verdict, signing petitions that state “our Justice System has let us down” or making their opinions known on Facebook and media websites.
Ersland was working in the pharmacy when two men entered to rob the place. Two female employees ran to the back while Ersland, a Gulf War veteran with PTSD pulled out a gun and shot one of the robbers, 16-year-old Antwun “Speedy” Parker, in the head. The other fled, and Ersland tried to follow but lost him.
Within a minute, Ersland came back into the drugstore, walked by the fallen robber and got a second gun. He then walked back to the fallen robber and shot five more times.
The prosecution wasn’t for the first shot, but the last five bullets. Ersland claims he was still moving, which was why he felt he had to continue shooting to defend himself and the two women.
A key issue is whether Parker was moving when he was shot again. He cannot be seen on the video recordings after he falls. Prosecutors said the evidence proves Parker was unarmed, unconscious and not moving. Defense attorneys contended he could have moved even while unconscious.
The jurors watched the security camera videos over and over. They could see a pool of Parker’s blood. According to the jurors, it never moved. Not a ripple. Parker never moved. Another juror said that Ersland never even glanced at Parker’s body when he came back into the store and got the gun, his favorite as he said during the police interview, and shot five more times. The convicted him of murder. Outrage ensued.
I stand by my verdict,” she said. “You just see it in the media, on Facebook, everywhere. Everybody has a comment and everybody knows about it.”
She said she wants critics to know that jurors had to go by what the law said.
She said, “There are laws and they’re set. And we had to follow the laws. As a jury we had to follow the laws. … I think it was a good decision. It was the law.”
Of the critics, she said, “People don’t know what they’re talking about. … They don’t know the laws. They weren’t there.”
Cases like Ersland’s become a focal point for political gloss, Rather than separate the first shot, one that no one has questioned was Ersland’s right in self-defense, from the last five, the issue is reduced to its lowest common denominator: Doesn’t a law-abiding business man have a right to put a stop to some punk robber who would have murdered him in a flash if he didn’t happen to have his own gun at the ready?
The jury of public opinion knows neither rules nor limits. It doesn’t bother with the nitty gritty. It won’t listen to reason or nuance. Right and wrong, in the broadest sense, are at stake. So what if Ersland took a few more shots than he should have, then he needed to. They won’t cry over the death of Antwun “Speedy” Parker. They are more likely to make a joke that Antwun wasn’t speedy enough. The public sees this as a fight between good and evil, and good won. Now good has been convicted for murder. And the public is outraged.
The reaction to Ersland’s killing of Parker is very reminiscent of the old New York case of Bernhard Goetz, the Subway Vigilante, which came to characterize the sense of outrage against crime that permeated the City back in 1985. As with Ersland, it had little to do with the facts of the case and all to do with the broad sense of good and evil, of anger and retribution.
Despite the public’s sense of outrage, its reduction of sensibility to its simplest form, courts aren’t supposed to indulge in appeasing the bloodlust of the masses. This jury didn’t, and did its job as the law required it to do. While one might suspect that criminal defense lawyers would blindly back the defendant, and indeed some respond exactly that way, it’s wrong.
Confronted with an armed robber in his drug store, Ersland was lawfully entitled to defend himself from the threat of deadly force. And he did. Once that threat is over, so too is his entitled to shoot. Whether Parker was as evil as assumed isn’t the point. Ersland doesn’t have to know of his childhood or whether Parker would have actually pulled a trigger before taking action.
But when a person, even a person engaged in heinous criminal activity, is dropped to the ground and lies there in a pool of blood, he is no longer a threat to anyone. It’s not even an argument that Ersland, in the heat of the moment and without reflection, continued to pump bullets into the body until the magazine was empty. He stopped shooting. He had an opportunity for reflection. He got a different gun. He returned to the body on the ground, lying in a pool of blood, and made a decision to fire five more bullets into it. This he could not lawfully do.
Parker is no hero. Parker is not even a sympathetic victim. Parker was a young man engaged in criminal conduct, a robbery. But Parker is dead. You can’t shoot people lying on the ground in a pool of their own blood. Not even bad guys.
Just as public opinion frequently vilifies a defendant without constraint of facts, it can vilify the victim and support a defendant whose conduct may have been very wrong, but who embodies public sentiment that he reflects the triumph of good over evil. Neither position reflects what the law is or what it should be.
The public doesn’t bother with the details. The jury must, and did.
This looks quite like the cases of Tony Martin and Munir Hussain, which caused outrage in England from journalists – and unhelpful interventions from politicians.
What surprises me about this case is the focus on the question of whether Parker was moving. Presumably Ersland said Parker was moving.
But everyone seems to me somehow to have got on the wrong side of this argument. Wouldn’t the obvious line of defence here be to argue that Parker was killed by the first shot? If it’s right that he wasn’t moving, might that not form the basis of reasonable doubt about whether he was alive then at all? If he wasn’t, surely Ersland had to be not guilty of murder (assuming self-defence is accepted re: the first shot).
I wonder how the prosecution proved Parker was alive here before the second shot.
While the reports fails to provide more specific information about the first shot, it’s not all that difficult for the medical examiner to determine that the first shot wasn’t fatal. But my issue with the “moving” argument is that even if there was movement, that alone doesn’t strike me as sufficient reason to assert that he remained a threat at all, no less a threat of deadly force.
Parker wasn’t on the video after he was shot the first time, nor was any of his blood. The jury saw still pics taken by the cops after they arrived. The prosecution had a “blood spatter expert” who said the blood under his head wasn’t disturbed, so therefore Parker wasn’t moving after he went down. Did he move? Beats me. Even if the blood pool proved he didn’t move his head, I’m not sure what not moving your head necessarily has to do with other body parts not moving. Say, for instance, your hands.
While this isn’t clear from the article involved, and seems a bit contrary to what the jurors said, it nonetheless doesn’t change the equation. It’s a very long way from body movement, any part of the body, to Parker’s being (1) a threat, and (2) a threat of deadly physical injury. A very, very long way.
I’ve seen the video many times, as has everybody else in the part of the state (it was on TV 24/7). No body, no blood. Your premise about the threat level is accurate so far as it goes, but it’s not quite as much of a jump if you take into account the effects of adrenalin. Ask any cop about that. 🙂
Did Ersland execute the kid? Probably, but I don’t think there’s any way to really know for sure. Certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt, at least not from what I know about the evidence that was presented.
Forget the adrenaline nonsense. Having run out and returned, retreived a different gun, the “heat” no longer suffices to justify the last five bullets. Moreover, the entitlement to kill someone isn’t justified by the “feelings” of the shooter rather than the conduct of the dead man. That cops claim it as a justification doesn’t make it so, just a convenient excuse. And given these facts, even a cop would be hardpressed to beat the rap. giving him all the benefit of the doubt.
The bottom line is once you put the guy down, do something else and come back, you don’t get to pump an extra five bullets into the body for good measure. There is no justification that makes this acceptable.
I listened to quite a bit of the interrogation video and was struck by Ersland’s manner. He sounds inauthentic and thus dishonest. I cut him slack for being in the shock of the trauma he helped perpetrate, but it’s sort of like… “I did what you guys would have done, right?”
Again, he did precisely what he should not have done, he should have shut up until he had a lawyer.
BL
No way he wasn’t going to cooperate with the police. He’s one of the good guys. Good guys don’t lawyer up.
I am a big believer in Castle Doctrine, the right to defend one’s own person and safety, the persons and safety of citizens near you, and one’s own domecile.
I believe in all of that.
However, in this case, from what I just read, I believe the jury was presented with convinced evidence that this guy’s actions went beyond any sort of Castle Doctrine action. According to the story he fired at one of two intruders and hit him in the head – the other takes off running, he pursues and loses him – he returns, passes by the first one he shot, retrieves an entirely different weapon, returns to the wounded man and then fires five more times?
That’s not simple defense of self and others in my book, and unless the defense could present really compelling evidence or a theory that really got my reasonable doubt hackles up… I suspect I would have voted the same way.
I do wonder, however, how much ‘rippling’ you can actually expect in a slowly spreading pool of blood if the leaking person in the center moves. I wouldn’t think it would be much, if any, and certainly not enough to be detectable on the average low quality surveillance system recording.
I wasn’t on the jury, but if what I read was indicative of what they say… I can’t fault them.
I didn’t say it was acceptable. But the adrenalin issue is real; after all, the essence of Murder I is malice (at least in Oklahoma). Being hyped up can say a hell of a lot about intent. What did he see? What did he think he saw?
I’ve had guns pointed at me. Trust me, you don’t think rationally when it happens.
Perhaps if he’d been granted the same 48 hour cooldown period that the cops get before being required to answer questions after a shooting, he’d have had a better shot at answering questions.
Yes, that’s right. An OCPD officer can’t be questioned for 48 hours after he or she shoots someone. It’s in the FOP contract.
You’re still ignoring the break between the first and next five shots. There’s nothing that makes this fly. You’re grasping at straws.
48 hours is the norm.
I’m not ignoring it; I’m concentrating on it. His mental state during that time period is the whole issue, or it should be at any rate, since sometime during that time period is when the intent to kill, if any, arose.
I figured OCPD wasn’t the only department to have that little luxury. Is it common?
The problem is that mental state isn’t something you determine by asking a guy, “so what were you thinking,” since people who shoot other people tend to be a bit untrustworthy about it. You determine it from the surrounding circumstances. The intervening time and events clearly provided a cooling down period, the most outrageous part of which was him getting a different gun, the one he preferred. Not even a close call.
But mental state also has to be reasonable (which is why nutjobs short of legally insane don’t get to commit crimes with impunity), and even if he was particularly delicate, it’s unreasonable to come back later to the guy you already shot, lying on the ground, no longer a threat, and shoot him 5 more times, just because he was a bit shaken up. Seriously, it’s not close.
What concerns me is the statement from the juror that “we had to follow the laws.” I find it sad that jurors have been trained to be unaware of their power to reach any decision that their conscience dictates. The juror certainly had the power to reach a not-guilty verdict, if that was what she felt was appropriate. Presumably the judge did his best to make sure that she didn’t realize that.
I think the juror was defending herself from attack, not arguing she would have acquitted but was forced to convict. There is nothing about this case to suggest there was any nullification issue involved.