Janine Jackson: If there is a word for being stunned and stunned again, and yet unable to become numb, it would go some way towards describing how people — especially black people — felt as we heard the verdict in the case of the murder of Philando Castile. That a jury determined no crime was committed when Police Officer Jeronimo Yanez pumped seven bullets at Castile and into the back seat of the car where his girlfriend and her four-year-old child were sitting. That this was the system working.
If these outcomes are to be more than a punch in the gut, we have to try and learn what they teach us about the limits of the law in achieving justice. The ultimate response to state violence against black people is building community power. But, with that, can the law — supposedly a living thing — be changed? What other points of intervention exist, and how do we measure progress?
Our next guest has been working on these issues for many years now. Ronnie Dunn is professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University in Ohio. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ronnie Dunn.
Ronnie Dunn: Thank you for having me.
There’s always room, it seems, for more surprise, but verdicts like the one we’ve just seen in the case of Philando Castile don’t come from nowhere; they have something to do with the rules that jurors are given in such cases. Can you tell us about the Supreme Court rulings around “reasonableness,” and the role they play in delivering outcomes like this?
Well, the Supreme Court ruled in Graham v. Connor that the standard used in such cases is the “reasonable officer standard,” and that being, would another officer, placed in the same set of circumstances and situation, respond accordingly with the use of deadly force? Then we have Tennessee v. Garner, which dealt with the “defense of life” standard. It shifted from the “fleeing felon” standard, wherein police could shoot at a felon as they fled, to that of defense of life, of either the officer or…