A Prosecutor's Take on the Minnesota Shooting

I worked on the Rodney King case. Here’s how I see the Good Case.

Editorial Credit: CNN

With protests over the fatal shooting of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross now cresting nationwide, the case has taken its place alongside a small number of episodes that have not merely shocked the country, but have forced it to confront foundational questions about power, accountability, and the rule of law. Rodney King. Kent State. George Floyd. Each involved lethal or near-lethal force by agents of the state, captured on camera, followed by a national reckoning over whether the system was capable of holding itself to account.

This case has quickly become a national Rorschach test. Public reaction has split sharply along partisan lines, with large majorities of Republicans viewing the shooting as justified and large majorities of Democrats viewing it as unjustified. That divide is familiar, if dispiriting. What makes this moment genuinely new, and genuinely alarming, is not public disagreement, but the response of the federal government, which has chosen to close ranks rather than open an investigation.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has publicly stated that the Justice Department sees no basis for opening a civil-rights investigation into the killing. It is difficult to overstate how extraordinary that conclusion is at this stage. The country has been transfixed by video of the shooting. Independent analysts and journalists are still reconstructing the sequence of events frame by frame. And yet the Department charged with enforcing the Constitution has announced, effectively at the outset, that it will not even investigate formally.

The DOJ’s actions have followed its words. The Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division, the unit that for decades has handled unlawful uses of force by law-enforcement officers, has been sidelined. Four senior career officials from that section resigned in protest. More striking still, six career prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota followed suit, reportedly after being pressed to give Ross a pass while redirecting investigative attention toward the widow of Renee Good.

This is a crucible moment. If this killing is allowed to pass, not because it has been fully investigated and found justified, but because it has been waved away, it will be a grave injustice to Renee Good and her family. But the damage would extend far beyond this case. A constitutional system that cannot bring itself even to investigate the killing of a civilian by its own agents is not merely failing at accountability; it is training itself, and the public, to expect none.

That is why the announcement from Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, joined by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, matters so profoundly. State and local authorities have launched an independent investigation into Good’s killing under Minnesota law, contemplating possible state homicide charges, as were brought successfully against Officer Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd. They have opened a public evidence portal, inviting citizens to submit video, photographs, and eyewitness accounts. It is an acknowledgment that, in an era of ubiquitous cameras, accountability does not depend exclusively on federal cooperation.

The federal government, however, has not merely declined to lead. It appears determined to obstruct. State investigators have been denied access to critical evidence assembled by federal authorities, including Good’s vehicle, Ross’s weapon, officer-filmed video, and witness statements. That posture, effectively hoarding evidence in a case of concurrent jurisdiction, is something I have never seen before. It leaves the state in a deep hole at the outset, with the practical effect of impeding any parallel investigation.

Legal experts in Minnesota have described the state’s effort as an uphill battle. It is. But it is also a necessary one. Minnesota’s decision to proceed, despite federal resistance, is not only a service to the state. At this moment, it is a service to the country.

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I approach this case through a particular lens. Early in my career, I worked intensively on the federal prosecution arising from the Rodney King beating as it was gearing up for trial. That experience left me with two lessons that have never faded.

First, these cases are hard, much harder than they appear when viewed through viral clips or headline summaries. Juries are skeptical. They are often sympathetic to law-enforcement officers. They understand that policing can be dangerous and chaotic, and they take seriously claims that officers must make split-second decisions under pressure.

Second, and this is the critical point, these cases turn not on the overall tableau, however disturbing, but on micro-points in the evidence. Precise instants. Where an officer was standing. What moved first. What could reasonably be perceived in fractions of a second.

In the King case, what initially looked like a continuous, brutal beating had to be broken down into discrete episodes. The federal prosecution succeeded, after the state prosecution failed, only by isolating specific moments when force could no longer plausibly be justified as an effort to subdue a suspect. That granular work is what persuaded the jury.

We are seeing that same process begin here. On Thursday, The New York Times published a second-by-second video analysis that appears to contradict the White House’s claim that Good’s vehicle struck Ross. That kind of painstaking reconstruction is not ancillary. It is the way successful cases are put together.

The investigation is barely underway, but I think we can now see five flashpoints that should drive the prosecution. Each of them points strongly towards guilt.

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Whether under Minnesota homicide law or 18 U.S.C. § 242, the case will turn on the legal and factual question of whether Ross reasonably believed that Good’s vehicle posed an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury. With that in mind, consider the persuasive force of these five pivot points.

1. No Predicate Threat

We now have video of Good’s arrival and the three minutes preceding the shooting. She parks in a way that partially blocks the street, but traffic continues to pass. She argues with officers, but nothing in her conduct is threatening. When the first officer forcibly reaches into her car, it looks clearly to be an unlawful arrest.

Unlike cases involving dangerous suspects or violent crime, nothing in the lead-up would have given Ross reason to apprehend a lethal threat from Good.

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2. Ross’s Approach and Positioning

The video shows Ross entering the scene without urgency. He does not rush, take cover, or issue shouted commands. He walks deliberately around the vehicle, scanning and assessing. Jurors notice demeanor, and this is not the demeanor of an officer confronting imminent danger.

Equally important is where Ross places himself. He positions himself beside the car, not in its direct path. The accumulating video evidence shows him leaning toward the driver’s side from a position where the wheels were not on course to strike him. That positioning places Ross outside the vehicle’s trajectory and sharply undercuts any claim that he reasonably perceived himself to be in the path of a deadly weapon.

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3. Pre-Arming for Deadly Force

As Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent with firearms-training expertise, has carefully documented, Ross switches his camera from his dominant hand to his non-dominant hand before any visible escalation, freeing his right hand to grip his weapon.

This is not reflex. It is preparation.

Officers are trained that deadly force is a last resort, to be employed only in response to an imminent threat. Preparing one’s weapon in advance of such a threat speaks directly to intent. It supports an inference not of mistake, but of conscious escalation, relevant both to reasonableness and to willfulness under Section 242.

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4. Action Versus Reaction

The defense will argue that Ross drew and fired in response to the vehicle being put into gear. Frame-by-frame analysis seriously undermines that claim. The draw and the movement of the vehicle occur essentially simultaneously.

Human reaction time matters. Perception, processing, and response cannot occur in the fraction of a second shown on the video. The more plausible inference is that Ross had already committed to using deadly force and fired as the situation unfolded, not because of it.

Deadly force must be responsive to an imminent threat, not anticipatory. Shots fired in anticipation do not meet the constitutional standard.

As for the administration’s persistent claim that the car hit Ross as it passed him after the first shot, the Times’s careful scrutiny and juxtaposition of various videos from the scene show, to a high if not conclusive degree of certainty, that it never happened and that, in particular, the wheels were pointed to the left of Ross. It will be a hard-fought issue if there is a trial, but the prosecution has far the better of the argument.

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5. The Later Shots and the Aftermath

Even if a jury were to give the defense the benefit of the doubt on the first shot, the second and third shots are fired from the side, after the vehicle is moving away from Ross. At that point, Ross is plainly no longer in danger. Continued use of deadly force under those circumstances is exceedingly difficult to justify.

Courts are especially skeptical of force that continues after a threat has passed. As in Rodney King and George Floyd, breaking the encounter into discrete moments reveals when force becomes unlawful.

Ross’s conduct after the shooting reinforces the point. After Good’s car crashes into a parked vehicle, seconds later, Ross mutters “fucking bitch,” words that The New York Times analysis attributes to him, and walks away, displaying none of the indicia of an officer who has just narrowly escaped death.

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Taken together, the evidence does not depict an officer overtaken by a sudden lethal emergency. It shows an officer who approached without urgency, positioned himself to avoid danger, prepared his weapon in advance, fired in anticipation rather than reaction, and continued shooting after any threat had passed.

Many people already are persuaded from having seen the video that charges should be brought tomorrow. Fewer but a sizable number – and some of them could always wind up on a jury, which must be unanimous – have the strong opposite prejudice. But for prosecutors, a final call to bring charges can only follow on the heels of a full investigation. Absent that, it is not tenable to assert, as prosecutors ultimately must, that a jury will conclude beyond a reasonable doubt.

More generally, it’s a high responsibility of prosecutors not to act on a gestalt sense. They are duty-bound to determine that, in the words of the principles of federal prosecution, that a conviction by a unanimous jury beyond a reasonable doubt is likely. To make that conclusion, there is no shortcut for having the full picture, including all the potential pitfalls, in making that judgement. And in this case, the picture continues to develop daily, as with the reports from just the last 48 hours of the points of entry of the bullets and the DOJ’s claim that Ross was treated in the hospital for chest pains as a result of the incident.

Some readers will see that stance as overly timid. Others will see my conclusion—that this case should be prosecuted subject to full investigation, as tendentious. That it provokes both reactions is not accidental, and it tells you something about the challenges ahead.

But having studied the available evidence closely, I believe it points strongly in one direction, and that a full investigation is likely to result in serious felony charges under Minnesota law. This was, in the language of law enforcement, a bad shoot.

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A killing of an innocent civilian is among the gravest acts a government can commit, and it demands the strongest possible response from the legal system. That response is what distinguishes a system governed by law from one that protects power by reflex. Here, the federal government has chosen instead to punt on first down. Its abdication leaves the burden of constitutional accountability in Minnesota’s hands alone.

The state’s commendable decision to take the task on, even with the obstacles imposed by the federal government, serves the entire nation’s interests in vindicating constitutional rights that the federal government appears not only willing, but determined, to ignore. Minnesota should not hesitate.

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