Eric Shaw Anniversary and the Failure of Pat White

Eric Shaw Anniversary and the Failure of Pat White

Was running late this AM - got home at 6:30 PM to find the alarm clock that didn't go off at 6:30 AM loudly buzzing. So I missed commenting on a couple items from this morning's Press-Citizen:

Jacki Rand's guest editorial takes the battle against Jim Leach's Indian-feather parade favors to the mainstream. Again, it surprises me how Leach has such a tin ear to the criticism - it hurts him with the Iowa City folks that have too long bought into his "moderate" act.

Much more importantly:

It's the 10th anniversary of the murder - yes, I call it murder - of Eric Shaw. Most days I pass under a bridge where a stenciled NO ROBOCOPS graffiti, common around town in the aftermath, still remains.

The paper takes the out on a limb position "it was hard and divisive." Well, duh.

The editors mention in passing:

The community has been divided over what to do with the police officer who said he "flinched" when he saw Shaw and accidentally pulled the trigger. The Johnson County attorney's office eventually decided that there was no malice; there was no criminal disregard for safety; there was only a man, pointing a gun, who was startled and accidentally triggered a catastrophe.

There were loud calls for resignations further up the police department's food chain, as well as louder calls for criminal prosecution of Gillespie's actions. Soon the events of August 30, 1996, were swallowed up in the media and legal circus of a wrongful death lawsuit against the city, authorities' deliberations over whether to charge Gillespie, a district judge ordering a grand jury to consider the case and, years later, a federal court deciding that Shaw's civil rights had not been violated.

I'm going to pick at this scar.

I believe that part of the job, the duty, the responsibility of a public official is to use the bully pulpit of his or her office to speak out if and when the laws they are sworn to implement or enforce are unworkable or immoral. Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek did that this year when he questioned the excessive mandatory sentences given to small-time drug offenders. My own boss has often spoken out on election law.

In declining to prosecute the officer who killed Eric Shaw, Johnson County Attorney J. Patrick White argued that the shooting fell between the cracks of the law. As I'm not an attorney I don't have the background to secondguess that call.

But clearly justice was not served, and Pat White could have denounced the shortcomings of the law even while upholding it. He could have said it deeply hurt him not to be able to take any action. He could have gone to the Legislature that next spring, lobbied and testified, and fought for a more just law. He's done so on other occasions - White has made it quite clear that he dislikes the 2000 foot sex offender radius and thinks it's unworkable, even as he's worked to enforce it. But in the case of Eric Shaw, he failed, refused, to speak out, leaving the impression that he'd washed his hands of the matter and wasn't all that concerned.

It seems Pat White would rather prosecute college kids who have a beer or a joint than police officers who shoot and kill innocent bystanders. I will not be sad to see him go, and as the accolades begin to pour in during his final months in office we need to remember the magnitude of this failure. I hope the office takes a new direction on the watch of Janet Lyness.