BLM gunman convicted of manslaughter, not murder, for shooting police officer to death

The new jury nullification

On June 23, 2021, police officer Jason Raynor approached a suspicious vehicle parked on a backstreet in Daytona Beach, FL. A man emerged from the vehicle, later identified as Othal Wallace. Raynor asked Wallace, who repeatedly ignored Raynor’s commands, a few basic questions before Wallace suddenly pulled out a gun and shot Raynor to death. The entire altercation, which lasted less than 20 seconds, was captured on video.

Wallace was captured several days later at a hideout in Georgia owned by the “Not Fucking Around Coalition,” a BLM group that advocates for armed resistance against racism. Wallace was found with body armor, rifles, and several flashbang grenades.

Although the case was open and shut, but the trial took years to begin. Defense attorneys claimed that Wallace was defending himself, even though he can be seen on video shooting the police officer in the head unprovoked. The defense also demanded the identities and addresses of donors to a fundraiser for the victim’s family. In their closing arguments, defense attorneys argued that Wallace had been the victim of profiling and was responding to aggression from the victim. "The real human circumstance a person who is surprised caught off guard and in a defensive posture and reacting to the provocation that they did not deserve,” said defense attorney Tim Pribisco.

It turns out that the victim was right to be suspicious of Wallace. Wallace was a radical black nationalist who was associated with several extremist groups, including those accused of violence. He had apparently received paramilitary training at a camp in Georgia, and wrote “One day I will take great honor in taking pigs’ blood on my hands and boots” on social media a few weeks before the shooting. At trial, Wallace denied that he was referring to police officers when he used the term “pigs.”

The jury’s verdict was shocking. Wallace was unambiguously guilty of murder. He planned to kill the police officer and did so, with the murder recorded on video. The conviction on the lower crime of manslaughter (a charge associated with unintentional or semi-justified killings) could only have been politically motivated.

The jury asked during its two day deliberation whether or not it was "lawful for an officer to physically restrain a citizen as a form of detainment." In other words, the jury was up in the air about whether or not the victim did something wrong when he restrained Wallace for behaving erratically (behavior that, as the shooting that followed would prove, genuinely was threatening). This reflects a complete collapse in common sense and and popular understanding of how society must work.

Yes, of course it was legal for the victim to try and restrain Wallace. If this weren’t the case, it would be effectively impossible for police to do their jobs. And yet, it’s very likely that a politically-motivated misconception (intentional or otherwise) of this reality led to Wallace receiving a lesser sentence for shooting someone in the head.

The lesser sentence is likely a product of local political radicalization. The trial took place in Broward County, which went 65% for Joe Biden in 2020. In 2021, a Broward County murder trial ended in a hung jury after three jurors simply refused to convict any black person of murder.

The murderer, Dayonte Resiles, was a career criminal who stabbed an elderly woman to death during a home invasion. The woman was tied up and placed in a bath tub before Resiles began stabbing her. Although the evidence against Resiles was overwhelming, he still attracted support from local BLM activists.

In the jury room, one of the jurors who refused to convict Resiles for anything because he was black threatened a juror who insisted that race shouldn’t involved in the decision to convict someone for murder. Fortunately, after a mistrial was declared, Resiles was retried for the crime and convicted. He was sentenced to life in prison.

The problem of politically-motivated jury nullification by leftist activists is only going to get worse in coming years. It is increasingly clear that liberals have no compunction about letting murderers walk free while convicting conservatives for bogus charges that carry huge sentences. It is essential that Red states do not allow this arrangement to continue.

In the interest of fairness, cases where political bias is likely to affect the outcome need to be handled by special state courts. Trials should be moved to areas where jurors can be better trusted to examine evidence objectively. It only takes one activist juror acting in bad faith to derail the conviction of someone who is unambiguously guilty of a serious crime. As political violence accelerates in the United States, it is imperative for conservative states to take steps to ensure that the perpetrators of political violence are convicted and removed from society.

The creation of special courts to handle political violence would also solve another huge issue in these cases. Namely, it is impossible to get a speedy trial when these politically-sensitive cases are treated like normal criminal matters. There are often dozens, maybe hundreds, of pre-trial filings and hearings that need to take occur before these trials can begin. Normal prosecutors and judges are already severely overworked. This allows defense attorneys to run out the clock, create a fake narrative, and pressure prosecutors to offer a plea deal or just drop the charges entirely.

New judges and new prosecutors need to be hired, for whom these cases will be their only concern. Special paths to fast-track the handling of appeals made during trial should also be created. Political violence threatens the system itself. Resolving any problem becomes impossible during a reign of terror. Other appellate issues can wait.

Trials that don’t happen quickly have no deterrent effect. Passions cool, the public forgets the crime, and violent activists continue their work uninterrupted. It should not take years to resolve a case where the murder happened on video. This is an issue that will take a long time to fix. State legislatures need to be proactive while they can.

The 2020 George Floyd riots weren’t crushed. The perpetrators weren’t killed or thrown in jail. The riots just suddenly stopped because the professional organizers of the rioting ordered them stopped. If Red states do not have the capacity to quickly arrest, try, and convict hundreds or even thousands of criminals whose guilt is not substantively in dispute, it is likely they will be overwhelmed during future organized civil unrest.