An 11-year-old boy called 911 for a domestic disturbance at his home. The police arrived and shot the boy.
The boy, Aderrien Murry, survived the shooting but “nearly lost his life,” his lawyer, Carlos Moore, said in a Facebook live stream earlier this week.
Murry was airlifted to hospital and suffered a collapsed lung, a lacerated liver, and fractured ribs. He is “still in emotional and mental pain,” Moore said during a news conference Thursday at Indianola City Hall in Mississippi.
Murry called 911 for help early Saturday morning at the request of his mother, Nakala Murry, who was having a confrontation with the father of another of her children. Police officers were told the man, who was unarmed, had left through the back door and three children were inside the home, according to Moore.
The cops told everyone in the house to come out with their hands up, prompting Aderrien Murry to come out of his bedroom. An officer “immediately shot him as he had his hands up and was turning the corner,” Moore said Thursday.
The officer who shot the boy, Greg Capers, has been placed on paid administrative leave.
Meet the sergeant. Greg Capers of the Indianola Police Department. He is the police officer who shot Aderrien Murry, an unarmed 11-year-old boy, after the boy called 911 for help for his mother. To this day, neither the officer nor the city have given the family any explanation as to why. #JusticeForAderrienMurry pic.twitter.com/4xSDL6cD4i
— Lawyer Carlos Moore (@Esquiremoore) May 26, 2023
Moore and the Murry family are asking the Indianola Police Department to release body camera footage of the incident.
“We can no longer tolerate a system that allows police officers to use deadly force with impunity,” Moore said in a statement. statement. “We must demand justice for this young man and his family.”
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is now investigating the shooting.
The man who had been threatening Nakala Murry was taken into police custody but released, according to CNN. She said the police released him because she had not filed a report against him. “When was I going to have time to do that? I was in the hospital with my son.”
FREE MINDS
Governments that comply more with the constitutions. A new article published in The review of international organizations provides a database “measuring governments’ compliance with national constitutions”:
Combine information about de jure constitutional norms with data on their de facto implementation. Individual compliance indicators can be grouped into four categories that we aggregate into an overall constitutional compliance indicator: property rights and rule of law, political rights, civil rights, and basic human rights. The database covers 175 countries during the period from 1900 to 2020 and can be used by researchers interested in studying the determinants or effects of (non-compliance with) constitutions. Our investigation of the stylized facts of constitutional compliance reveals a long-term increase in compliance, occurring mainly around the year 1990. The Americas experienced the steepest increase in compliance, but also Africa and Europe improved particularly at the end of the war. cold. Democracies, particularly those with parliamentary and mixed systems, show higher constitutional compliance than non-democracies, among which military dictatorships have the worst performance. The constitutional design also matters: Constitutions that allow the dismissal of the head of State or Government for violating constitutional norms are being complied with more.
You can read the full document here.
FREE MARKET
A Supreme Court ruling yesterday in Sackett v. EPA reduces federal government control over wetlands. The Court held that the Clean Water Act (CWA) applies only to “wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are ‘waters of the United States’ in their own right” and that are “indistinguishable “of those waters, thus rejecting a lower court decision expansive view of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) regulatory authority over certain lands.
The case stems from a dispute over the ownership of Miguel and Chantell Sackett. The Sacketts wanted to fill in their lot in Priest Lake, Idaho, and build a house on it. But the EPA said this lot contained wetlands, so filling it in violated the CWA’s ban on dumping pollutants into “the waters of the United States”.
The EPA defined the Sacketts’ property as wetlands because it was near a ditch that emptied into a stream that fed an intrastate navigable lake. The Sacketts said their property did not contain “waters of the United States.”
A US District Court and the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sided with the EPA. Now, the Supreme Court has sided with the Sacketts. Of The Volokh Conspiracy:
According to Judge Alito, this means that wetlands that have a continuous surface water connection or are directly adjacent to jurisdictional waters can be regulated as part of the waters of the United States, those wetlands that are physically “separated” from such waters. they cannot be, even if they would satisfy a broader definition of “adjacent”. He writes:
In summary, we hold that the CWA extends only to those wetlands that are “practically indistinguishable from the waters of the United States.” rapans, 547 US, at 755 (majority opinion) (emphasis removed). This requires the party asserting jurisdiction over the adjacent wetlands to establish “first, that the adjacent wetlands [body of water constitutes] . . . ‘water[s] of the United States’ (ie, a relatively permanent body of water connected to traditional interstate navigable waters); and second, that the wetland has a continuous surface connection to that water, making it difficult to determine where the ‘water’ ends and the ‘wetland’ begins.” ID., at 742.
You can find the full decision here.
Reason‘s Ronald Bailey wrote about the case yesterday, calling the Court’s decision a “common sense conclusion”. Reason TV covered the case in a video earlier this year:
QUICK HITS
• One hundred years ago this weekend, the United States Attorney General made it legal for women to wear pants.
• Jail officials refused to give Dexter Barry his heart transplant medication. Days later, he was dead.
• Clinical psychologist Lisa Damour suggests that the biggest problem with kids and smartphones or other digital technology is that it’s displacing sleep.
• “How did the Internet get so puritanical?” asks Aja Romano in vox.
• President Joe Biden is re-adopting the mandatory minimums for drug offenses.
• “As details about an emerging bipartisan debt deal leak out just days before a possible default, House conservatives are increasingly disgruntled,” reports political.
• South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster has just signed a law banning most abortions at six weeks of pregnancy (which equates to just four weeks gestation and about two weeks after a pregnancy is detected). pregnancy).
• Minnesota Governor Tim Walz vetoed a bill that would have revolutionized the rideshare industry by establishing a minimum wage for drivers. Walz’s veto comes “after Uber threatened to halt its operations in the Minnesota metropolitan area, outside of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, if the bill were to become law,” reports CBS News.
• “A Republican-led committee in the Texas House of Representatives recommended Thursday that state attorney general Ken Paxton be indicted for a series of abuses of office that committee investigators say may have been crimes.” , points The New York Times.
