What does it take to hold thug with a badge accountable for murder?

By David McElroy · May 9, 2013

If you or I were to murder a police officer, what do you suppose the sentence would be? Death? Life without parole? 40 years? Whatever it would be, it wouldn’t be a slap on the wrist.

So what happens when a police officer murders an unarmed 54-year-old Sunday school teacher and flat-out lies about what happened? If you’re Daniel Harmon-Wright, you get three years for “voluntary manslaughter.”

Why do we have one set of rules for people with badges and another set of rules for us?

Harmon-Wright was a police officer who responded to a report of a “suspicious woman” in a church parking lot in Culpeper, Va., at 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning last year. The woman was actually at the church to apply for a job, and nobody has said what made her “suspicious.” Harmon-Wright claimed that he tried to reach inside the woman’s vehicle to take her license, but she suddenly rolled the window up on his arm — trapping him — and tried to drive away.

There were problems with this story, though. Most importantly, a carpenter working in sight of the confrontation said nothing of the sort happened. He said the officer had his gun in one hand and had his other hand on the woman’s door handle. When she tried to drive away, the officer fired at least six shots, killing the woman.

Pure and simple, Harmon-Wright murdered a woman who tried to drive away from him.

He was put on trial on charges of murder, malicious shooting into an occupied vehicle resulting in a death, and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. Do you know how hard it is to even get those sorts of charges against a police officer in a case such as this? But small-town juries in conservative states such as Virginia are prone to being soft on police when evaluating their actions. So even though they agreed he was responsible, they convicted him of “voluntary manslaughter” and recommended just a three-year sentence.

It’s hard to see a more open and shut case for sending a bad cop to prison for murder. So why did he get off with so little punishment? Why do we have one system of justice for the rest of us and another standard for people who are given a gun and a badge?

There are good police officers, but the fact that so many people are willing to give a blanket pass to those who truly do wrong makes me more and more afraid of all of them. In too many cases, they have a virtual blank check — and this kind of cop is going to make you pay with your life when you don’t “respect my authority.”

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts