Alameda County, in California, encompasses radical Berkeley, semi-radical Oakland, upper-class leftist Piedmont, all-business Emeryville, more conservative Fremont and Hayward, and a host of other incorporated and unincorporated cities. Somehow twelve citizens of these very diverse communities managed to come together and do the right thing:
A jury opted for the death penalty Monday for a Newark man who fatally shot a San Leandro police officer in 2005 to avoid going to jail for having drugs and guns in his possession.
It was the first Alameda County jury to render a death verdict for killing a police officer since capital punishment was reinstated in California in the 1970s.
Irving Ramirez, 25, showed no reaction when the verdict was read in the Oakland courtroom of Alameda County Superior Court Judge Jon Rolefson. The judge will formally sentence him Aug. 3.
The same jury convicted Ramirez on May 10 of first-degree murder for killing Officer Nels “Dan” Niemi, 42. It also found Ramirez guilty of enhancements for firing a weapon and special circumstances of killing a police officer and killing to avoid arrest.
About 35 San Leandro police officers, Niemi’s widow, Dionne, his brother, Jim, and his parents, Rudie and Mildred of Alamo, were in court when the verdict was read in a case prosecuted by Alameda County’s top prosecutor, District Attorney Tom Orloff. Spectators overflowed into the courthouse hallway.
Dionne Niemi wept after the verdict was read, and several officers pumped their fists.
Ramirez’s attorneys, Michael Berger and Deborah Levy, declined comment. Orloff said he was pleased for the police and Niemi’s family. “I’m very relieved,” he said. “In a case like this, the pressure builds up.”
Previous defendants convicted of killing law-enforcement officers in Alameda County have received lengthy or life-in-prison sentences as a result of jury verdicts or deals with prosecutors. In one case, a defendant was acquitted.
Even as a child, raised in an civic environment where police were routinely called “pigs” (this was San Francisco, after all), I’ve never had anything but respect for those men and women who put their lives on the line so that I can live in greater safety. (Clearly, my parents raised me right.) While there always have been and always will be police officers who use their positions to bully others, or who fall prey to corruption, there is no doubt in my mind that the greatest number of American police officers are our fathers, brothers, and sons, only a bit braver than the rest of us. I’m glad that justice was done for Officer Nels “Dan” Niemi.
Filed under: Crime and punishment
Personally, I think that the death penalty should be mandated for cop killers. If it deters even one criminal from making things worse, it might be worth it.
The police represent the enforcement branch of the Law and Order part. Attacking them is the same as attacking the community, even if ethically speaking the individual situations differ at times depending upon the honesty and corruption of the police and/or attackers involved.
Just as you cannot allow looters and saboteurs to operate freely in your city, you cannot allow anyone to resist the law or be seen as successfully resisting the police. There must be a certain amount of futility you instill in the population concerning the resistance to law and order. Otherwise you have Baghdad 2005. Kosovo. Darfur. I can go on but that should be enough.
Tom Orloff is a crook. The reason he is a crook is, despite his sworn oath to treat people equally before the law, he never prosecutes VIPs who are plugged into the Alameda County Political Machine.
When he goes into a high profile case, where no one is sympathetic to the criminal, it’s just grandstanding. It’s pretty damn easy to prosecute someone who know one feels sorry for, it’s completely different to follow your oaths of office when the people who need to be prosecuted, Don Perata for starters, are powerful and can do you political damage.
I probably should not do this, but I feel I have to respond to the poster who said the population needs to feel the futility of resisting the police.
How about the idea that, instead of feeling futility of resisting the police, (which, by the way, is not the lesson a person inclined towards crime would take away from this case. A gangster who followed this case would learn to pick up his shell casings, and not tell his girlfriend or others that he shot anyone. If Ramirez had done those things, most likely he would not have been convictable, from what I’ve read about the case anyway)making the people WANT to arrest criminals, real criminals anyway, and resisting the police when they are in the wrong, helping them when they are not?
I can tell you from bitter personal experience, the sheriff’s department in Alameda County has many deputies who will lie when they think their bosses want it.
Should the population not resist police who lie to convict innocent people? This poster is fundamentally anti-american if you ask me. Perhaps the American Revolutionaires should have felt the futility of resisting the police, the British soldiers?
Just as you cannot allow looters and saboteurs to operate freely in your city, you cannot allow anyone to resist the law or be seen as successfully resisting the police. There must be a certain amount of futility you instill in the population concerning the resistance to law and order.
I actually changed resist police to resist law and order, because I knew people would take law and order to mean the police. But they aren’t the police. When the police become corrupt, they become those resisting law and order, and that is that. Law and order is both a hierarchy, true, but it is also a principle like the US Constitution or Bill of Rights.