1y ago

Man imprisoned 16 years for wrongful conviction fatally shot by Georgia deputy

www.cbsnews.com Man imprisoned 16 years for wrongful conviction fatally shot by Georgia deputy

Leonard Allen Cure resisted arrest during a traffic stop, authorities say. He'd gotten $817,000 in compensation in August from Florida, where he'd been behind bars.

A man who spent more than 16 years in prison in Florida on a wrongful conviction was shot and killed Monday by a sheriff's deputy in Georgia during a traffic stop, authorities and representatives said.

Leonard Allen Cure, 53, was identified by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is reviewing the shooting.

164 comments

This story is fucked. He was wrongfully convicted and then set free, gets $800k compensation in August, then pulled over (looks like they’re still coming up with a reason for pulling him over), threatened I’m sure with more jail (essentially provoked), tased then shot.
~~I think some fucking cops were after him and pissed that the dude got paid.~~
Video link from a comment below. Not a good look for the guy. Hard video to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GrcptVf8Yk
- And the alleged 'good cops' are out here confused why no one respects them.
  
  And the alleged ‘good cops’ are out here confused why no one respects them.
  Until I start running across evidence that some police are angrier about the bad cops than they are about everyone else being angry about the bad cops, I refuse to believe they exist.
  
  Good cops don't exist lmao
  
  paying their union dues, which keep going up because the defense of their fellow cop's actions are expensive... if they get caught and lose qualified immunity.
- gets $800k compensation in August
  Ok so this whole story is fucked up beyond belief but I just want to take a minute to say holy shit, because that dollar figure is pretty messed up in and of itself. They gave him $817k. That's $5.82/hr.
  
  Minimum wage plus overtime for his time in prison placed monthly into a mutual fund with 7% return for 16 years would be a little over 2.5 million dollars.
  
  Yeah could be better but I do love that Ron desantis had to sign that shit.
  
  It may have also incensed the police doing the slaying that he got any money, let alone out of prison.
  
  Or $51k/yr which is representative of what he could have earned.
  Certainly doesn't excuse the wrongful conviction but their math is a little more in tune with reality than $819k divided by (16x24x365) equals OMG.
- Isn't this basically what happened with the Making a Murderer guy? He was due a huge settlement from being wrongfully convicted, so they planted a bunch of evidence to put him back in jail instead.
  
  The police were definitely corrupt, but that documentary is intentionally misleading.
  While some evidence may be in question, it's important to know that Teresa Halbach's vehicle was found on the property, along with charred pieces of ~~her~~ human bones in a burn pit.
  It was the last place she went, the last place she was seen, and Avery lured here there under false pretenses (Teresa was not even supposed to be meeting with Avery).
  None of this excuses any bad behaviors by the police, and that department certainly appears to be corrupt, but probably not a good example for this instance.
  
  That was my takeaway. The more fucked up part is that they dragged his nephew into it and at each man's trial, told wildly differing stories about how the murder supposedly occurred.
  
  Haven’t seen it but that sounds fucked too
- Public execution because of jealousy? And nothing will happen to the cops?
  
  The police will do a full investigation of themselves and find no wrong doing. After that, the murderer will return from his paid vacation, which will allow his wife for some much needed time to recover.
  
  USA! USA!
  
  I really wish Batman was real these days.
- Their Reason: Driving While Black
  
  I always joke with my black girlfriend when she driving. I'll say "Be careful you don't want to get pulled over for a DWB". She laughs, I laugh, we both die a little inside.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GrcptVf8Yk
  Dash and body cam footage of the incident. They didn't need to retroactively come up with a reason for pulling him over, it's right there in the footage - he apparently was speeding at 100 mph.
  
  Edited my comment, thanks. Very difficult to watch. I don’t love the way the interaction was handled by either of the men, though. I understand speeding is dangerous and against the law, but he began the interaction at 11. This could have gone another way, despite the apparent mental health issues the dude was clearly dealing with.
- I think some fucking cops were after him and pissed that the dude got paid.
  Stop making up shit. This is tragic enough without people fantasising about the how's and what's.
  
  That’s why I said “I think” instead of stating it as fact. Sus is sus.

That cop had better be charged and jailed for the rest of his life.
Mf'ers murdering with impunity over a traffic stop. 😡
- Best I can do is a promotion to another department and a 6 month paid vacation.
  
  I hate that you're right.
- Give the cop solitary confinement for life.
  
  Pretty sure he’s going to get a commendation from the commissioner and a sweet pension for life.
- I really really hope someone gets the video of the stop released. That's the only way there's ever any accountability in these cases. Even then it can be an uphill battle.

This was a hit.
- Or just the usual treatment of a black man in georgia. We may never know which..
  
  Well sure, if you go by media companies which make money off of sensational headlines rather than factual statistics. Of course you'll never know.
- He was a poor black man in Georgia.
  This was a statistically likely outcome.
  
  He had just recently received an 800k payout for wrongful conviction in FL. I wouldn't call him poor.

Miller couldn't comment specifically on Cure's death but said he has represented dozens of people convicted of crimes who were later exonerated.
"Even when they're free, they always struggled with the concern, the fear that they'll be convicted and incarcerated again for something they didn't do," he said.
Totally understandable. I would imagine that's kind of traumatic.
(He was incarcerated in FL and killed in GA btw)
Assuming this wasn't execution...
Cops are taught Killilogy. I gather they're trained to protect their own life at all costs and that the public is out to kill them. Also deep seated racism^1 means they fear black men more. So they shoot at the drop of a hat (or for no reason at all).
We really need to disarm the goddamn cops if they can't be trained to de-escalate and control a situation without murdering civilians all the time.
Did you know that early 1900s crime "statistics" were heavily biased against black people? These "statistics" established a bullshit racist narrative that black people are more prone to commit crime, which persists to this day, influencing government policies, more than a century later? (Source: The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad)
- I won't suspect an intent where a regular assholeness applies.
  That said, they feel like they own the streets. Not only scared, but drunk on the lack of consequencies. That double-wrong story and recent accident when a cop raced after a suspect and slammed into an uninvolved car killing two shows how everything is wrong with their current position and thinking. Act now, think later - as their motto. It's not what these public servants are supposed to do, not ones with guns and tanks.
  ACAB, because to be this one good cop, you need to actively and implicitly avoid using this given power to do fuck all. This system and their union enables them to act like shit by default. When you order something by delivery, you don't think about how a character of a delivery guy affects the state of a package, you complain if they give you a box of feces. Why cops aren't judged like that when they put feces whenever they like, and are free to do so, with lethal consequencies.
  
  There might be a ton of awesome cops in my town, but the SPOG - seattle police officer's guild - is constructed to defend the worst and maximize the force's overtime grift. So fuck.

I think there should be a presumption that this is retaliatory
- Considering this happened in a different state, I'm sure it's just the standard procedure of pulling over random black people and murdering them.
  
  It’s worse that it’s not a conspiracy and it’s just the norm

Anytime you all want to band together and do something about those motherfuckers
Anytime
- Aren't we mostly software developers and general tech nerds here? Maybe we could make some sort of statement, or impact using those skills?
  
  Finally someone calls it like it is. Y'all won't do shit.
- Riiight
- Go get them meal team six!
- Armchair heroes unite!
- If only yous had some sort of outdated rights to like, guns or something
- Yeah, after you lol

"I can only imagine what it's like to know your son is innocent and watch him be sentenced to life in prison, to be exonerated and ... then be told that once he's been freed, he's been shot dead," Miller said. "I can't imagine as a parent what that feels like."
Pretty tragic.

How do the police manage to murder someone in a traffic stop??? Doesn't that just entail the police telling someone their brake lights aren't working or ticketing them for being 5mph over the speed limit? Man I'm glad the police (and everybody else for that matter) don't have guns in my country because that would be happening here too. That poor man and his family.
- Because they were looking for him and murdered him on purpose.
  
  I just read the article and that is absolutely disgusting, even if the deputy's side of the story is all true why are they allowed kill someone for "resisting arrest??" Shouldn't they only use their gun if their life or the lives of members of the public are being threatened? I really hope that cop gets life in prison and has an extremely miserable rest of his life like the cop that murdered George Floyd, but something tells me that won't be happening here.

This was a hit. The cops don't like it when someone publicly and professionally embarrasses them.
- He was killed in a different state. I think it's just that Black men are killed all the time by cops.

Hated by two branches out of three
- Three branches out of three
  
  And hanged from one branch out of a tree (sort of)
- You mean branches of government? I don't think the police are a branch of government... I mean the executive, or the executors is a pretty good description for them, though the branch of government executive tends to execute policy not people.

The police are just an organized crime syndicate.
- Your statement is factually true
  There are gangs within the police. Systemic crisis within systemic crisis.
  
  404 Page not found.
  Thank you, that was very informative.

Does the police not have an independent body that reviews any time the police use their firearms? Surely it should be an automatic suspension, regardless of the reason. How does the US seem to have such a big police problem?
- Police Unions. There's a few Behind the Bastards podcast episodes on how they started.

People give me shit for saying the South is a store, then stuff like this happens.
- Hey @jimbolauski@lemmy.world , still think I've got rustled jimmies or can we see a bit more eye to eye now about my hate of the South?
  
  only racist cops in the south
  So we just gonna act like Chicago/Detroit/NY PD doesn't exist?
  
  I see I'm living in your head rent free.
  I don't have enough detailes. I don't like to jump to conclusions based on limited information.

Ah, but ain't that America for you and me?
- Something to see, baby…
  Telling that the song was written as a criticism of class in America, but conservatives missed the point and ran with it as a model of what they thought America should be - little pink houses, for you and me.

Jesus wept.
- This quote from the Lazarus story, the shortest in the Bible, makes no sense.
  Christians generally believe Jesus is God.
  So, "God cried".
  All powerful, all knowing God, cried because his friend, who he could have saved if he bothered responding to Lazarus' family's pleas for help and arrive timely to heal him.
  Does your God cry because of scheduling conflicts?
  Does your God cry over dead friends he knows he will revive in a bit?
  Does your God cry just to relate & fit in with all the others at the funeral crying?
  Just about death, that he created? Is it the personal responsibility for all death?
  Why would your God need to cry?! F'ing ridiculous.
  
  Now Jesus is doing that uncontrollable sobbing, floods of tears running down his face.
  he’s inconsolable.

For reference, dash cam footage of the incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GrcptVf8Yk

Jesus Christ.

164 comments