Man Shoots Intruder, Who Turns Out To Be a Cop

Should He Even Be In Jail, 

Let Alone Face the Death Penalty?

This May, Officer Charles Dinwiddie and fellow members of his SWAT Team crawled into the windows of a Killeen, Texas home, unannounced, at 5:30 am.
The practice is known as a ‘no-knock raid.’ It is intended to catch the occupants of the home off-guard.
In this case, however, it ended in tragedy. The man living in the home opened fire, wounding another officer in the leg and killing Dinwiddie. Two other officers received only minor injuries due to their protective armor.
The raid was intended to look for drugs in Marvin Louise Guy’s home. Instead, no drugs were found, although a few pieces of evidence suggesting drug use was recovered.
Guy, who woke from a dead sleep to find the officers entering his home, is now facing the death penalty in Texas for shooting a cop.
Unbelievably, this is not the first time it happened in Texas. In December 2013, another man shot a police officer when they conducted a no-knock raid to look for drugs.
In that case, the jury refused to indict, noting that Henry Goedrich Magee had a right to defend his home and his pregnant girlfriend from what he believed were intruders.
His lawyer agreed.
“This was a terrible tragedy that a deputy sheriff was killed, but Hank Magee believed that he and his pregnant girlfriend were being robbed,” Dick DeGuerin, told the Associated Press. “He did what a lot of people would have done. He defended himself and his girlfriend and his home.”
In this case, however, Guy, who is 49, is being charged not only with capital murder for Dinwiddie’s death, but for three cases of attempted capital murder for the other cops injured while crawling into the home.
The prosecutor Bell County District Attorney Henry Garza has also said he plans to seek the death penalty against Guy, despite the precedent set when Magee was ultimately not charged at all.
Some point out that the fact Guy is black and Magee is white may be one of the reasons for seeking the ultimate punishment.
Others think that it is a sign of a police force and legal system gone amok.
“Had the man in the dark of night been a burglar, Guy would be a Texas hero. They would hold a parade for him and name a day “Marvin Louis Guy Day” to celebrate how he took out some scuzzball who nobody cared about anyway,” criminal justice blogger Scott Greenfield wrote, “But Dinwiddie was a cop, even though there was no way Guy could have known that.  Even in Killeen, smoking some crack* isn’t that big a deal.”