State and local leaders say
they do not believe that the FBI-investigation of the shooting death of #Renee #Nicole #Good will be fair and impartial,
and are sounding alarms about the 💥impact of federal officials holding onto evidence in a potential prosecution of the ICE agent who killed her.
Minnesota’s lead investigative agency, the "bureau of criminal apprehension", initially began investigating the shooting in conjunction with the FBI.
But the #BCA issued a statement Thursday morning saying that
“the US attorney’s office had reversed course:
the investigation would now be led solely by the FBI,
and the BCA would no longer have access to the case materials,
scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation”.
Hennepin county attorney #Mary #Moriarty, an elected Democrat and the county’s prosecutor, clarified at a press conference Friday that the BCA
– which was established in the wake of the George Floyd case
– has a very high investigative standard and that this standard
can’t be met when the organization doesn’t have access to all the evidence.
It does not preclude an investigation, she said.
But a lack of access to evidence hampers the investigation.
“When the BCA came to the scene, the evidence had been taken by the FBI,” she said.
🆘 “They collected the car and took it wherever the BCA does not have access to the car. And the problem isn’t that the FBI took the car, it’s that 👉the BCA doesn’t have access to the car, or right now, even access to the forensic evaluation that happens as a result of the investigation with that car.”
In a press conference on Friday, the Minneapolis mayor, #Jacob #Frey, described the federal government’s narrative casting Good as the villain as “#garbage” and called on the state to conduct its own investigation.
“This is a time to follow the law,” he said.
“This is not a time to hide from the facts.
This is a time to embrace them,
making sure that we’re pushing for transparency every step of the way.”
“The fact that Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice and this presidential administration has already come to a conclusion about those facts is deeply concerning,” he added.
Media reports have identified the agent who shot Good as Jonathan Ross. ICE agents allowed Ross to #leave the scene in the moments after the shooting, taking the weapon used in the shooting with him.
“It doesn’t preclude a state investigation, but if the feds are saying, for example, you don’t even get to look at the firearm that was used to kill this person, that would certainly complicate it,”
said #Eric J #Nelson, a defense attorney in Minneapolis with a long record of defending police officers accused of crimes.
Nelson represented Derek Chauvin in his murder trial for killing Floyd.
The legal standard for proving a case of excessive force rests on the
🔹“objective reasonableness” of the act as given in the
🔹"Graham v Connor" case decided by the US supreme court in 1989.
From that case flows policies governing when and how police officers can use force.
The standards are essentially the same for both state and federal prosecutions, he said.
The breakdown in cooperation between state and federal agencies in this investigation is “shocking”, Nelson said,
and flies in the face of the public’s expectations of legal norms.
“There may be political differences, but ultimately in a question in a case like this, I don’t really think politics should have a place,” he said.
the Guardian
Leaders alarmed about fairness of FBI inquiry into Minneapolis ICE shooting
State and local officials say they do not believe investigation into shooting death of Renee Nicole Good will be objective
