How Is This An ‘Accident’?
Picking up from a comment I posted over on Jack’s item, the issue at hand now is the medical examiner’s determination that the death of James Chasse was “accidental”.
“That’s interesting,” writes Jack, “considering that so far, I haven’t heard that anyone from that office was present when the officers were, ahem, ‘interacting’ with the victim.”
In the context of determining the cause of death, the medical examiner (and, I believe, a jury of inquest, as we learned during the one held in the officer-involved shooting death of James Jahar Perez) has six options under ORS 146: natural, accidental, suicidal, homicidal, legal intervention or undetermined.
(Oddly, the previously-linked page for the local medical examiner claims only four options: natural causes, an accident, or the actions of the decedent or another person.)
It’s important to note that in this context, “homicide” would not necessarily mean “murder” — it simply means (sticking with the local office’s stated four options) that the person did not intentionally kill themselves, didn’t die naturally, and didn’t die as the result of the equivalent of falling off a ladder while stringing up Christmas lights.
A ruling of “homicide” in this context would have meant, simply, that another person (or other persons) was involved in the death.
In this case, the medical examiner has said that the “broad based” blunt-force trauma to the chest could have been caused either by Chasse falling down or someone falling on top of him — either one of which would have been directly attributable to his being hassled by police.
Given all of that, one is hard pressed to understand how a death resulting from the actions of police officers towards a mentally ill man is considered by the medical examiner to be the equivalent of James Chasse falling off a ladder while stringing up Christmas lights.
Addendum: By the way, the “review by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s office” mentioned in a statement by the Portland Police Association? Forget it, because Schrunk loves the police, and will skew it however he has to in order to protect them.