That's actually almost certainly what happened. The people saying "well, he should have known by weight and feel" are people who just assume that because they weigh and feel differently in the comfort of the living room they're posting from, that these facts necessarily present themselves to the brain in the middle of a tense situation. That does not excuse shooting him, because quite frankly, there IS no excuse for shooting a person when you meant to TASER them, but it certainly does explain why it's manslaughter instead of murder.TheHammer wrote: Doing further reading, its entirely possible the cop was intending to Taze Grant and somehow mistook his gun for his tazer. I've seen others say that the weight and location of each should have told him otherwise, but you never know.
As to the seizure of evidence:
The problem with the complaint that seizure of evidence looks bad is that it looks bad only if you're assuming the police are corrupt to begin with. That could be because people either are ignorant of the laws regarding evidence, or simply because they insist on interpreting anything the police do in the worst possible light.
The job of the police is to investigate crimes and arrest criminals. Sometimes, this includes other police officers. Sometimes, there are problems because of that, wherein certain police officers try to to "cover for" their buddy who has done something wrong.
Distrust of the police based on the knowledge that this sometimes happens is understandable. The problem arises, however, when that distrust is used as a reason why specific actions in a specific case are wrong without actual evidence of wrongdoing.
For one thing, there is no such thing as the police covering up "their" errors. If there's a coverup, it's of the error of specific individuals who are police officers, not of a mistake that somehow becomes the collective error of police as a whole, either of that agency or police in general. If a coverup occurs, similarly, it's by the officers doing the coverup, not by police in general or even by every officer in that agency.
Second, while police "brotherhood" and covering for each other make great cinema, TV, and even sensationalist news when they happen, very few police want to do this. No one wants to go down with a dirty cop when he gets caught, and some agencies have very publicly humiliating things they do to corrupt officers in addition to any criminal and administrative penalties. Customs and Border Protection posts your picture on their Trust Betrayed website with a detailed description of what you did. I know of one police department that melted down the guns, badges and handcuffs of some officers caught selling dope and which cut their pictures from Academy photos with scissors.
In any case, without actual evidence that the police are engaging in wrongdoing in a specific instance, assuming that they are doing so because of "distrust" based on "past incidents", and because of how it "looks bad" (which is based on that mistrust) is really.. well, it's bigotry. It's not really different than racial profiling; essentially it's assuming wrongdoing because people who are part of the same general group have done so in the past, but not based on any actual evidence at the present time. In fact, even if there is actual evidence of wrongdoing in a particular instance, the wrongdoing of other police officers at other points in the past isn't evidence any more than the fact that blacks have committed murder in the past is evidence that a specific black man committed a specific murder.
It's a ine and healthy thing in a free society for the public to question authority. However, when the question turns from "Why are you doing that?" into "Why would you do that if you weren't corrupt" without any other supporting facts, the problem is not with authority, the problem is with certain members of the public who cannot understand that evidence is needed for all accusations of wrongdoing
