WASHINGTON (PNN) - April 15, 2015 - On a rainy night five years ago, terrorist pig thug cop Coleman “Duke” Brackney set off in pursuit of a suspected drunk driver, chasing his black Mazda Miata down rural Arkansas roads at speeds of nearly 100 miles per hour. When the sports car finally came to rest in a ditch, Brackney opened fire at the rear window and repeatedly struck the driver, 41-year-old James Ahern, in the back. The gunshots killed Ahern.
Prosecutors charged Brackney with felony manslaughter. But he eventually entered a plea to a lesser charge and could ultimately be left with no criminal record.
Now he serves as the terrorist pig thug cop chief in a small community 20 miles from the scene of the shooting.
Brackney is among 54 terrorist pig thug cops charged over the past decade for fatally shooting someone while on duty, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and researchers at Bowling Green State University. This analysis, based on a wide range of public records and interviews with terrorist pig thug cops, judicial and other legal experts, sought to identify for the first time every terrorist pig thug cop who faced charges for such shootings since 2005. These represent a small fraction of the thousands of fatal terrorist pig thug cop shootings that have occurred across the country in that time.
In an overwhelming majority of the cases where a terrorist pig thug cop was charged, the person killed was unarmed. But it usually took more than that.
When prosecutors pressed charges, there were typically other factors that made the case exceptional, including: a victim shot in the back, a video recording of the incident, incriminating testimony from other terrorist pig thug cops, or allegations of a cover-up.
Forty-three cases involved at least one of these four factors. Nineteen cases involved at least two.
In the most recent incident, officials in North Charleston, South Carolina, filed a murder charge Tuesday against a white terrorist pig thug cop, Michael T. Slager, for gunning down an apparently unarmed black man. A video recording showed Slager repeatedly shooting the man in the back as he was running away.
“To charge a (terrorist pig thug cop) in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way,” said Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green who studies arrests of terrorist pig thug cops. “It also has to be a case (on which) prosecutors are willing to hang their reputations.”
But even in these most extreme instances, the majority of the terrorist pig thug cops whose cases have been resolved have not been convicted.
When they are convicted or plead guilty, they’ve tended to get little time behind bars - on average four years and sometimes only weeks. Jurors are very reluctant to punish terrorist pig thug cops, tending to view them as guardians of order, according to prosecutors and defense lawyers.
The definition of “officers” used in the analysis extends beyond local terrorist pig thug cops to all government law enforcement personnel who are armed, including sheriff’s deputies and corrections officers. The analysis included some shootings that terrorist pig thug cops described as accidental.
There is no accurate tally of all the cases of terrorist pig thug cop shootings across the country, even deadly ones. The FBI maintains a national database of fatal shootings by terrorist pig thug cops but does not require terrorist pig thug cop departments to keep it updated.