In the following days and weeks, Randall’s mother searched for answers in vain, calling the Texas Rangers and the Rusk County district attorney’s office. She had no idea how her son wound up dead after a police traffic stop. “No one was telling us anything,” said Tippitt, who was born and raised in Rusk County and now cleans houses for a living.
Her first shock came two months after the shooting when a grand jury returned a no bill in the case, meaning it chose not to indict Iversen for killing an unarmed man.
The second came last summer when Iversen’s lawyers turned over the dashcam video after she filed a federal lawsuit. Nearly two years after the shooting, she finally got to see, in brutal detail, what happened in the moments before her youngest son was killed.
“The only person that was attacking anybody was Sgt. Iversen attacking my son,” Tippitt said.
Iversen quietly retired after the shooting and fought in court to keep the video from being made public. Its release sparked a backlash in rural Rusk County. It also set Randall’s mother on a crusade to get justice for his killing.
But whether that will happen — and what it would even look like — remains to be seen.
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In general, I oppose the death penalty. My argument against it goes broadly along the lines that our social contract is based around the system protecting each individual (thus, it cannot kill them), and that rehabilitation should always be on the table (benefits everyone).
I definitely think that people in power that abuse their power in order to commit a crime should be far more severely punished that an ordinary person committing the same crime.
Whether the above extrapolates to the point where it is justified to execute police officers that have body cam footage of themselves executing unarmed, non-threatening civilians (there are plenty such cases) is actually a question I’m a bit torn about. There are a couple videos out there (that no one should see) which show police straight up purposefully executing civilians that are either incapacitated or otherwise neutralized (lying face-down, spread eagle, unarmed). Should these warrant execution of the officer involved? I haven’t concluded for myself what I think yet.