Police Shootings / Possible Abuse Threads [merged]

The New Mexico Justice Department says it will not criminally prosecute three police officers who went to the wrong house when responding to a call last year and fatally shot the armed homeowner as he opened the door.

Deputy Attorney General Greer E. Staley said in a letter dated Friday that an expert report had found the Farmington police officers’ use of deadly force was “lawful” in light of the threat they faced from Robert Dotson, 52, and then his wife, who were both armed. Department spokesperson Lauren Rodriguez said in a statement Wednesday that there was “no basis” for criminally prosecuting the officers “after a careful review of the facts.”

Last September, Dotson’s family sued the city of Farmington and the three officers involved in the incident, Daniel Estrada, Dylan Goodluck and Waylon Wasson. The lawsuit alleged that the officers “acted unreasonably” and “applied excessive, unnecessary force” in fatally shooting Dotson — while knowing they may have been at the wrong residence.

Body-camera footage released just more than a week after the shooting late on April 5 last year showed the officers talking about how they were not sure whether they were at the correct address while responding to a domestic violence call.

According to a police statement issued the day after the shooting, when there was no answer to their knock on the door after they identified themselves as police officers, the officers asked the dispatcher to call the party that made the initial report to ask them to come to the front door. They then discussed whether they were at the right address.

When Dotson opened the screen door and began to raise his gun, police opened fire, body-cam footage showed. After Dotson was shot, his wife, Kimberly, opened fire on the officers, the police statement at the time said. Police then returned fire.

“Once she realized that the individuals outside the residence were officers, she put the gun down and complied with the officer’s commands,” the statement said, adding that Dotson’s wife was not injured. Dotson was struck by 12 bullets and pronounced dead the next day, the family’s lawsuit said.

Staley, in a letter addressed to the district attorney, said that to “hold an officer accountable for the use of excessive force, the State would be required to disprove beyond a reasonable doubt that a reasonable officer would have acted as the officer did under the totality of the circumstances.”

A detailed report from Seth Stoughton — a former police officer, professor and an expert in the use of force by police officers for the New Mexico Justice Department — found that “both Mr. Dotson and Ms. Dotson presented imminent threats of death or great bodily harm to the officers at the time.”


The officers’ use of “deadly force” was therefore “proportional to the threat that Mr. Dotson and Ms. Dotson presented at the time,” Stoughton said in his report, which was attached to Staley’s letter...............

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/01/31/police-shooting-robert-dotson-farmington/