here, obviously you ve amped up from that. you believe there s shots being fired at you. it s about the perception of fear. is that perception that you have or fear joe, imminent enough for me to then strike back at you? and is the threat posed to me and the force that i use proportionate to what that threat is? and of course when you re acting under the sphere of all of the excitement and under the sphere of just having a moment to react, it s a bit different. and i think that s why in this case what you saw the defense do is say look it s not about monday morning quarterbacking it s about what your perceptions were at that time. of course if you re on the prosecution s side, you re going to say that your actions were unreasonable. you came out from cover, you stood on that hood and you discharged your weapon into that car. firing and using as they said joe, using him as target practice and really killing you see the victims there. killing them of course there is the issue of causatio
that time does it transcend the bounds of that to now jump on top of a hood of a car, where you re exposed. and then the question becomes from a prosecution perspective, well if they had a weapon and you really felt that you were in danger of you dying, why would you fully exposureself jumping on a hood and firing rounds into that car? unless you intended to kill them and knew that they posed no threat to you? and so that s what needs to be balanced. was that the proper thing to do in accordance with your training no matter how scared you were? and so the prosecution is resounding the themes of accountability yes, police are scared. yes, they have a tough job. but should they not reassess a situation and evaluate and use as a defense as excuse me the experts have said in this case for the prosecution, lethal force as an absolute last resort resort. and that includes discharging your firearm. now 30,000-foot view i would like to come back to walter madison for a moment. we re at a ver
killed when police fired 137 shots at their vehicle in november of 2012 following a high-speed chase that wound through the streets of cleveland. you can see from an image we have here coming up just how many bullets went through the vehicle s windshield. the red lines show their trajectory right there. prosecutors say after the chase, brelo climbed on the hood of the chevy malibu and fired an additional 15 shots from there. a dozen other officers we know fired their guns as well. now prosecutors say breelo s decision to get on the hood was unreasonable and showed his intent to kill. brelo s defense said he had probable cause. that he and the other officers believed that they were going to die. we want to talk more about this case with attorney walter madison, who is with us now. he s plugged into the cleveland community and representing the family of tamir rice the 12-year-old shot and killed bay police officer in cleveland.
doubt as with williams that he caused at least one of them. i find it possible but not beyond a reasonable doubt, that he caused two of them. i cannot however, as mentioned, find beyond a reasonable doubt, which of the four fatal wounds he caused. in russell s case it is likely that he is responsible for 15-c given that shot s downward and right-to-left trajectory and brelo s likely spot on the hood more or less between williams and russell. which put brelo slightly to russell s right. so for both timothy russell and melissa williams i have found beyond a reasonable doubt that brelo fired at least one shot which by itself would have caused russell s death.
officers regardless of their tactical mistakes. box was out from cover near the malibu s driver s side. eric o donnell and rinkus were exposed on the passenger side or the safety of the positions these other officers took. even officers who were behind cover and thus mostly protected from any shots coming out of the suspects car were justified, according to kitsaris in firing as many shots as they did. moreover in kitsaris brelo reasonably perceived a threat justifying about 34 shots at the suspects. so where did brelo run afoul of the constitution? as kitsaris put it because at the point of going on the trunk of his own car, 238 and then on the malibu s hood he is taking action that is not trained, not