In February 2023, Shifflett was chasing Johnson outside the mall for stealing sunglasses from Nordstrom. Despite calls for Shifflett to drop to the ground, body camera footage captured him running into a wooded area. Shifflett fired his gun twice with one bullet hitting Johnson in the chest.
Shifflett testified in trial that he believed Johnson was about to pull out a gun from his waistband, but investigators never found a weapon on Johnson or at the scene.
Prosecutor Jenna Sands said if he had paused for a few more seconds to wait on other officers, things would have ended differently.
“Seconds could have meant life for Mr. Johnson rather than death, but he didn’t pause,” Sands said in court. “He rushed in and he was reckless.”
During his trial, Shifflet testified on his own behalf and delivered a quote that would be shocking if it wasn’t already well-known (at least to Black people) that violent police culture is about a lot more than a “few bad apples.”
“I did not have the luxury to wait to see a gun,” he said. “We are trained that hands are going to harm you and hands are what are going to kill you.”
Bruh — WHAT?
Cops literally order suspects to “SHOW ME YOUR HANDS” and now this ex-cop is testifying that cops don’t actually need to see a weapon to have the green light to shoot — their training says all they need to see is hands.
In a perfect world, a trained police sergeant who chased down an unarmed man who stole sunglass, shot him dead and then claimed some standard rendition of “I was in fear for my life” in order to justify it would’ve been charged with much more than reckless discharge of a firearm, and he would be serving much more than three years in prison for taking a life in a situation where any reasonable person would say it was unnecessary. However, in the world of MAGA Republicans — where Jan. 6 rioters who viciously attacked police officers are political prisoners, but Black Lives Matter demonstrators are terrorists whether there’s a riot or not — a GOP governor has decided even the measly three years Shifflett would have had to spend in prison was far too much.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin released the following statement Sunday:
“I have today used the executive clemency authority granted to me by the Constitution of Virginia and commuted the sentence imposed on Sgt. Wesley Shifflett who was convicted of recklessly discharging a firearm by the Fairfax County Circuit Court.”
“I am convinced that the court’s sentence of incarceration is unjust and violates the cornerstone of our justice system—that similarly situated individuals receive proportionate sentences. I want to emphasize that a jury acquitted Sgt. Shifflett of the more serious charge of involuntary manslaughter, a conviction for which the sentencing guidelines recommend no jail time or up to six months incarceration.
“In this case, the court rejected the Senior Probation and Parole Officer’s recommendation of no incarceration nor supervised probation and instead imposed a sentence of five years incarceration with two suspended and an additional five years of probation. Sgt. Shifflett has no prior criminal record, and was, by all accounts, an exemplary police officer. It is in the interest of justice that he be released immediately.
“My action does not limit Sgt. Shifflett’s right to appeal his reckless discharge of a firearm conviction.”
The first thing that stands out about Youngkin’s statement — I mean, besides the fact that it doesn’t include a single mention of the victim or a single detail about the crime the ex-cop committed — is his insistence that “similarly situated individuals” have received lesser sentences for the same infraction Shifflett was convicted of. It sounds like he was essentially saying: “Cops kill unarmed Black people for no discernable reason all the time and they don’t get prison time, so why start now? It’s clearly injustice!”
It’s frustrating to even hear Youngkin speaking about “similarly situated individuals” receiving “proportionate sentences” as “the cornerstone of our justice system while Black people have been talking about the disproportionate sentencing that Black convicts face for eons only to have such talk dismissed as “woke” nonsense no matter how many studies (literally all of them) indicate that it’s true.
But what does Youngkin care about systemic racism? This is the governor whose literal first order of business upon taking office was a ban on Critical Race Theory.
Of course, officials like Glenn Youngkin don’t want CRT to be studied. They don’t want to end up being a chapter in that textbook.
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