Atlanta cops indicted for killing eldery woman

Federal investigators have released a time line in the Kathryn Johnston case, and it's absolutely horrifying. We now learn that even the initial bust that produced the tip leading to the raid was due to planted evidence. Which means everything about this case was created and manufactured by these cops. The instinctual ease with which these three officers piled lie on top of lie, the fact that they very nearly got away with it, and the fact that none of the three had a single moment of moral clarity until their case began unraveling three weeks later—it's all chilling. Consider this passage:

Johnston got off one shot, the bullet missing her target and hitting a porch roof. The three narcotics officers answered with 39 bullets.

Five or six bullets hit the terrified woman. Authorities never figured out who fired the fatal bullet, the one that hit Johnston in the chest. Some pieces of the other bullets -- friendly fire -- hit Junnier and two other cops.

The officers handcuffed the mortally wounded woman and searched the house.

There was no Sam.

There were no drugs.

There were no cameras that the officers had claimed was the reason for the no-knock warrant.

Just Johnston, handcuffed and bleeding on her living room floor.

That is when the officers took it to another level. Three baggies of marijuana were retrieved from the trunk of the car and planted in Johnston's basement. The rest of the pot from the trunk was dropped down a sewage drain and disappeared.

The three began getting their stories straight.

While an innocent, elderly woman lay bleeding, handcuffed, and dying on the floor of her own home due to their malfeasance, these animals went about planting drugs to implicate her, and concocting a story to save their own hides. Every case these officers ever worked on needs to be reopened. And that's just getting started. A police department that could produce these three dirty cops, and allow them to operate, is a department that has almost certainly produced many more. It would be awfully coincidental if the only three bad drug cops at APD all happened to be working together this particular night, and happened to get caught on this particular raid.

Johnston's murder should also be a wake-up call for those who instinctively believe initial police accounts of what happened during one of these raids. I suspect that if Kathryn Johnston had been a 22-year old innocent man instead of an 88 (or 92, depending on who's reporting)-year old innocent woman, we may still not know exactly what happened in that house.

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That said, I also agree that we, the people, have created an atmosphere that breeds this sort of behavior. How often do we clamor for "law and order?" Not necessarily the people on this board (though, as with any collection of individuals, some of them have), but as a society, we've put so much emphasis on stopping crime--particularly drug crime, but we see similar cases in gambling, and even in crimes with actual victims--that we judge number of arrests and number of convictions.

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I beg to differ. I know of no one personally in all of my life who has agreed with the "war on drugs."

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It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

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It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

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Then you've chosen your company with great care. Unfortunately, I know a lot of people who support it. Heck, more than a few people on this board do, and we're a self-selected group of people with a higher-than-average propensity toward individual freedom. A lot of people support the War on (Some) Drugs because they swallow what the Great Glass Teat tells them, hook, line, and sinker, and the tube (by way of government/quasi-government propaganda) says "drugs are bad, mmm'kay?" That's another unique characteristic of THR members: we tend to be critical thinkers, and distrustful of the official line; even with that, we have people who believe in the Drug War.

In any case, I stand by my claim that the community's demand that the police "do something!" about society's problems, without critical oversight of their actions, or critical analysis of the underlying policies, creates a situation which breeds such morally corrupt actions, and even encourages it.

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It makes me shudder to think that there are legions of people who are pro War on (Some) Drugs, on this board and elsewhere.

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