Texas Grand Jury Declines to Indict Pot Grower Who Shot and Killed a Cop During an Early-Morning Raid

February 7, 2014

Surprising news:

This week a Texas grand jury declined to indict a marijuana grower for shooting and killing a sheriff’s deputy who burst into his home in the early morning to execute a search warrant. Henry Goedrich Magee, who was indicted on drug and weapon charges (the latter only because he was growing marijuana), said he believed Burleson County Sgt. Adam Sowders was a burglar. “This was a terrible tragedy that a deputy sheriff was killed, but Hank Magee believed that he and his pregnant girlfriend were being robbed,” Magee’s lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, told A.P. “He did what a lot of people would have done. He defended himself and his girlfriend and his home.”
DeGuerin, a well-known defense attorney who has been practicing for half a century, said “he could not immediately remember another example of a Texas grand jury declining to indict a defendant in the death of a law enforcement officer.” That sort of outcome is rare not just in Texas but throughout the country, since people who shoot cops invading their homes usually do not get the same benefit of the doubt as cops do when the roles are reversed. (Just ask Cory Maye.)

Rare indeed. This is a big win for civil liberties advocates of every stripe. While I don’t relish the thought of police officers being shot to death, it is no crime for a person that genuinely and reasonably fears for their life to defend themselves using deadly force. It is not the homeowner’s fault that he reasonably feared for his life when his door was busted down in the middle of the night by armed men shouting at the top of their lungs.

This is a perfect example of why these types of drug raids are dangerous to everyone involved. Police frequently execute these raids in the middle of the night, often using no-knock warrants when people are asleep, startling the inhabitants and leading them to believe that their house is being invaded by an intruder. This creates a low-information/high-stress environment where tragic consequences are entirely predictable. These raids are completely unnecessary in most cases where they are used, and they put everyone involved—police officers and home-owners alike— in unnecessary danger.

4:45pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZMMjnx16jnrdb

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