I was just on the radio program "Legally Speaking" with Nathaniel Lee​. We talked about a citizen having the right to use deadly force against a police officer that was using force to accomplish an illegal arrest. It just so happens that Chief Hite came on the program following Nate and he confirmed that a citizen has the right to kill a police officer if necessary to stop the officer from illegally arresting you or someone else. I am learning with each passing day that we think just because a person is a lawyer they know all the law. Nothing could be further from the truth. They know some law, but no one knows all the laws, including a judge! So just because a lawyer speaks about the law does not mean he knows the law of which he/she is speaking. Here is the law concerning your right as a citizen to kill a police officer if the police officer is illegally trying to arrest you.

“Citizens may resist unlawful arrest to the point of taking an arresting officer's life if necessary.” Plummer v. State, 136 Ind. 306. This premise was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in the case: John Bad Elk v. U.S., 177 U.S. 529. The Court stated: “Where the officer is killed in the course of the disorder which naturally accompanies an attempted arrest that is resisted, the law looks with very different eyes upon the transaction, when the officer had the right to make the arrest, from what it does if the officer had no right. What may be murder in the first case might be nothing more than manslaughter in the other, or the facts might show that no offense had been committed.”
“An arrest made with a defective warrant, or one issued without affidavit, or one that fails to allege a crime is within jurisdiction, and one who is being arrested, may resist arrest and break away. lf the arresting officer is killed by one who is so resisting, the killing will be no more than an involuntary manslaughter.” Housh v. People, 75 111. 491; reaffirmed and quoted in State v. Leach, 7 Conn. 452; State v. Gleason, 32 Kan. 245; Ballard v. State, 43 Ohio 349; State v Rousseau, 241 P. 2d 447; State v. Spaulding, 34 Minn. 3621.
“When a person, being without fault, is in a place where he has a right to be, is violently assaulted, he may, without retreating, repel by force, and if, in the reasonable exercise of his right of self defense, his assailant is killed, he is justified.” Runyan v. State, 57 Ind. 80; Miller v. State, 74 Ind. 1.
“These principles apply as well to an officer attempting to make an arrest, who abuses his authority and transcends the bounds thereof by the use of unnecessary force and violence, as they do to a private individual who unlawfully uses such force and violence.” Jones v. State, 26 Tex. App. I; Beaverts v. State, 4 Tex. App. 1 75; Skidmore v. State, 43 Tex. 93, 903.
“An illegal arrest is an assault and battery. The person so attempted to be restrained of his liberty has the same right to use force in defending himself as he would in repelling any other assault and battery.” (State v. Robinson, 145 ME. 77, 72 ATL. 260).
“Each person has the right to resist an unlawful arrest. In such a case, the person attempting the arrest stands in the position of a wrongdoer and may be resisted by the use of force, as in self- defense.” (State v. Mobley, 240 N.C. 476, 83 S.E. 2d 100).
“One may come to the aid of another being unlawfully arrested, just as he may where one is being assaulted, molested, raped or kidnapped. Thus it is not an offense to liberate one from the unlawful custody of an officer, even though he may have submitted to such custody, without resistance.” (Adams v. State, 121 Ga. 16, 48 S.E. 910).
“Story affirmed the right of self-defense by persons held illegally. In his own writings, he had admitted that ‘a situation could arise in which the checks-and-balances principle ceased to work and the various branches of government concurred in a gross usurpation.’ There would be no usual remedy by changing the law or passing an amendment to the Constitution, should the oppressed party be a minority. Story concluded, ‘If there be any remedy at all ... it is a remedy never provided for by human institutions.’ That was the ‘ultimate right of all human beings in extreme cases to resist oppression, and to apply force against ruinous injustice.’” (From Mutiny on the Amistad by Howard Jones, Oxford University Press, 1987, an account of the reading of the decision in the case by Justice Joseph Story of the Supreme Court.

This goes on all the time. I have been confronting this behavior for 42 years personally and a victim to it and I have been in the struggle for others since I was 9 years old. I have been so much more exposed to this as a eye witness. I have seen men killed by law enforcement and hung by the neck until death in the Marion County Jail. I call to mind the viscious assault of Jane Harrington a anchor on wthr channel 13 by a police officer. The little 9 year old boy on 38th and Keystone that was shot down by a police over a 25 cent bag of chips and killed him. What about the little Black girl that was killed by a white police because he mistook her for a dog around 30th and played his way out of it. Now this case sheds light on exactly what happened to Michael Brown. My thought are focused on the officer's mother's comments. His mother is devastated and she is making no excuses for him. She knows what was in her son's heart because she knows what is in hers as a mother. She knows the danger he has placed her family in. She knows the dark cloud he has brought to police there and abroad. We also know the light this has brought to the public. I was handcuffed and beaten un- conscious by 13 white deputies while in hand cuffs and I simply was speaking out against a murder of a white prisoner that had killed by tossing that old man from cop to cop until he died. 13 white deputies and they were pronouncing me dead the next day when I miraculously came back and the the Wishard Hospital records has the record of that assault. Then these Black police have enough nerve to speak of me having mental issues. I have every right to claim everything on the mental menu. You try living under that severity of that level of abuse. They even threatened to kill every prisoner if they told what happened. This is a serious matter. I am tired and this kind of trauma is having a serious effect on me. I want to file a law suit for emotional damage about all of these police killings. I have had a police that came to my house with the intent to kill me for fighting against a drug lord and gang. It was Black officer that pulled me out of this white police's path because got out of control and stomped up the step to assault me and Officer Rumph, a Black officer moved me up on my porch because that had made his mind up he was going to kill him a nigger right in the heart of Haughville. He almost knocked the Black police down. I had another white police come to take a report here at my house where I live now and he came to my back door and I opened the door and he unbottoned his holster and stood back off of me. i asked him to come so I would not have to yell all of my personal business out and he stated; Oh I am fine right here. Why was he at my back door? Why was he hiding beside my house. Why was he ready to kill?? I wasn't upset. Ijjst needed a report. He left without the report. They made him come back and he still refused to give the report. None of the other police ever came to my rear door. Just anybody he Black that he could kill that day would do. Look at the Balck veteran they went in that 74 year old Black man's home for a welfare check and kicked in his back door and surprized him and he not knowing they immediately shot and killed him. This was the same state where this police killed Walter Scott in cold blood. They had no business kicking in his door without a warrant. This has to be addressed immediately.

Michael,

This is serious stuff!