“A former suburban Kansas City police chief who helped rescue a baby from an icy pond and later assaulted the man who confessed to trying to kill the infant has pleaded guilty,” the U.K.-based tabloid Daily Mail reported on Thursday, July 29, 2021 (read story here), adding that the “officer’s case became a rallying cry for people in the town of Greenwood, Missouri,” who believed “the father deserved what the chief dished out to him after trying to drown his own daughter.”
The ex-police chief was prosecuted by federal authorities for excessive force and violating the perp’s civil rights. The terms of the plea deal weren’t revealed, but he called them “fair.” Meanwhile, the perp is sitting in jail awaiting disposition of the felony charges of domestic assault and child abuse against him.
Thinking he’d done away with his infant child, he went to a police station and turned himself in. The police chief and another officer rushed to the pond and, according to the Daily Mail, found “the unconscious infant floating face up and her lungs filled with water … [with] mud in her eyes, grass and water in her mouth, and … barely moving.” They “worked to warm and revive” the child until paramedics arrived and took her to a hospital. The child had “severe hypothermia but survived.”
Then, after returning to the police station, the enraged chief “was captured on video grabbing [the perp] by the throat, throwing him to the floor and punching him in the face,” and told him “you deserve to die,” according to the Kansas City Star (read story here).
Yeah, he probably does, but the police’s job is to arrest him, not execute him. Vigilantims can’t be countenanced, and is worse when police do it, because they’re supposed to set an example of law and order.
Besides, the death penalty isn’t applicable to this case, because the child isn’t dead. Missouri’s death penalty only applies to first-degree murder accompanied by specified aggravating circumstances (details here).
The chief needn’t have bothered. When the perp goes to prison, and the other inmates find out what he did, they’ll kill him. The prison vigilante will be eligible for the death penalty (aggravating factor #9), but the authorities won’t bother. He’ll just get another life sentence. And everybody will be satisfied.