Brief filed by FOP: Cops should be judged differently from civilians in use of force.

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The National Fraternal Order of Police in December filed an amicus brief on behalf of William Ben Darby, the former Huntsville officer, arguing his conviction last summer should be overturned. Darby is currently serving a 25-year sentence for murder.

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In the 32-page brief to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, the FOP argues that the trial court in Darby’s case should have instructed the jury to decide the case from the perspective of a reasonable police officer making split second decisions, a standard applied to on-duty officers when deciding civil cases.

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On the afternoon of April 3, 2018, Parker called police to report that he was feeling suicidal. When the first two officers arrived at Parker’s west Huntsville home, they found him sitting on a couch and holding what later turned out to be a flare gun to his own head.

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Body camera footage showed Darby, the third officer to arrive on the scene, move past the two senior officers and shoot Parker in the face with a shotgun 11 seconds after entering the home. Before firing, Darby shouted four times for Parker to put down his gun.

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The FOP argues that Pate should have given the jury instructions based on Supreme Court rulings in two key cases, Graham v. Connor and Tennessee v. Garner, which established what’s known as the “reasonableness” standard for judging use of force by police in civil cases. James acknowledged that those two Supreme Court cases deal with civil liability, rather than criminal prosecutions. But he wrote that juries in criminal trials should also decide cases based on the “reasonableness” standard.

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