It was about 8 PM, and Ryan Fredrick was sleeping.\u00c2\u00a0 He had to get up early for his soda delivery job.\u00c2\u00a0 Two days before he his home was burglarized, and in a nearby neighborhood people had been killed in a home invasion.\u00c2\u00a0 He had bought a gun to protect himself.<\/p>\n
He woke to pounding and smashing sounds at his front door.\u00c2\u00a0 He grabbed his gun, ran out of the bedroom, and saw that part of his door had been smashed in.\u00c2\u00a0 An arm was coming through the broken door.\u00c2\u00a0 Thinking, correctly, that he was being attacked by thugs, he fired through the door.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately for him, the thugs were police officers.\u00c2\u00a0 One of them was cleverly standing sideways to the door, where his armor didn’t protect him.\u00c2\u00a0 He was hit by the bullet and killed.<\/p>\n
As soon as he heard them shout “Police” he dropped his weapon and surrendered.\u00c2\u00a0 Surprisingly, the cops didn’t execute him on the spot, but arrested him instead.<\/p>\n
He waited in jail for a year.\u00c2\u00a0 Supporters put a sign on his front lawn, and over a hundred people signed it.\u00c2\u00a0 The local bureaucrats amused themselves by citing him for code violations, some of which included damage done by the police and the burglars.\u00c2\u00a0 They were particarly pissed about the sign, which claimed was a safety volition.<\/p>\n
It turned out the burglars were working for the cops.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a sweet deal for both sides.\u00c2\u00a0 When the cops didn’t have probable cause for a warrant they’d send in their free-lance burglars, who would steal what they could and snitch to the cops, giving them the pretense for a raid.<\/p>\n
They were looking for pot.\u00c2\u00a0 They believed, without any evidence, that Ryan had a major growing operation.\u00c2\u00a0 In the trial it came out that he had grown a few plants in the past, but wasn’t doing it at the time of the raid.\u00c2\u00a0 They only found a few grams of pot when they raided his home.<\/p>\n
The prosecutor was eager to set a record for the number of dishonest dirty tricks in a trial.\u00c2\u00a0 He started out with the claim that Ryan was “stoned out of his mind” and “in a blind rage,”\u00c2\u00a0 eager to kill cops.\u00c2\u00a0 If anyone on the jury had ever smoked a joint they would have known to disregard anything the DA said from that point forward.\u00c2\u00a0 (As the great philosopher Bill Hicks explained<\/a>, “I have never seen people on pot get in a fight because. . . it’s fucking impossible.”)\u00c2\u00a0 His first witness was the cop’s mother, who had absolutely no facts to offer, just an emotional plea to the jury to avenge the death of her son.\u00c2\u00a0 The DA brought in a jailhouse snitch, who claimed Ryan said he wanted to kill cops.\u00c2\u00a0 The defense discredited his testimony so thoroughly even the DA told the jury to disregard it.<\/p>\n But a cop was killed, and someone had to be punished.\u00c2\u00a0 The jury declined to convict Ryan on capital murder, bringing back a verdict of manslaughter, and a recommendation he receive the maximum sentence.\u00c2\u00a0 Ryan won’t see daylight for at least seven and a half years.\u00c2\u00a0 He should have been acquitted.<\/p>\n The real criminals in this case were the police.\u00c2\u00a0 They broke the law to get a pretense for the raid, but that’s standard operating procedure for most police departments.\u00c2\u00a0 The real crime was breaking into a citizen’s home in a SWAT raid.\u00c2\u00a0 They could have arrested Ryan when he was on his way to work in the morning, quietly, peacefully, and then searched his now empty house.\u00c2\u00a0 It would have been a minor local story and Ryan would have received a fine for the small amount of pot he had in the house.\u00c2\u00a0 But no, they had too much testosterone for that.\u00c2\u00a0 They had to get all dressed up in their fancy gear and play army men.\u00c2\u00a0 And when this sleepy guy defended himself from unidentified thugs breaking into his house, one life was lost and another was ruined.<\/p>\n This is not an isolated instance.\u00c2\u00a0 Hundreds of these raids happen every year and far too many end in tragedy<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Cop who murder citizens go free, but when a citizen defends themselves and kills a cop they go to jail, sometimes even to death row.\u00c2\u00a0 All over the most harmless intoxicant known to man.\u00c2\u00a0 All because these thugs in blue are adrenaline junkies who simply don’t give a rat’s ass about the citizens they pretend to protect.<\/p>\n