Alex Pretti’s Killers Will Likely Go to Jail

Subscribe to Old Goats with Jonathan Alter, where this video originally appeared (Amended transcript of video below)

Because we are now living in an authoritarian state, it’s easy to assume that the ICE agents who killed Alex Pretti in cold blood with 10 shots will not be held to account. That’s wrong. Because ICE is withholding their identities, it might take a while to identify the killers. But the names will come out. Then they will in all likelihood be arrested, indicted and given a fair trial. After which, it’s a good bet that the culprits will go to jail.

Why am I so certain that justice will be done? I spoke on Friday, before this shooting, to Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, and he explained to me the way the system works. There’s nothing that prevents local police from arresting federal law enforcement when they commit crimes. Krasner said that he was expecting that Hennepin County DA Mary Moriarty would indict Jonathan Ross for the murder of Renee Good fairly soon. Moriarty, a well-regarded DA, is asking a court to have ICE give her some of the evidence that they collected. But she has plenty of videotaped evidence without the federal government’s help.

The facts in the Alex Pretti are even clearer, and it’s only a matter of time before Minneapolis Police arrest the killers and charge them with murder. If the killers have fled Minnesota, local police in other jurisdictions can arrest them.

But how about immunity? The vice president says that federal law enforcement agents have “absolute immunity.” That’s a lie. There’s no such thing. There is something called “qualified immunity.” That means that their acts have to be “reasonable” in order to protect them from arrest and prosecution. In this case, there was nothing at all reasonable about what those ICE agents did. They put ten bullets into Alex Pretti after he had been disarmed, when he was on the ground, under the control of other ICE agents.

So I think we can expect an arrest soon. Maybe multiple arrests, depending on who fired those ten shots. And you will then see an indictment, and justice served. Eventually.

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