Legal Analysis of Fatal Shooting of Alex J. Pretti Presented

Renowned attorney and self-defense expert Andrew F. Branca, author of The Law of Self Defense, has released a detailed breakdown of the fatal shooting of Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis.

According to Branca’s analysis, several factors would typically be relied upon by law enforcement to argue that the use of deadly force was lawful:

• A physical struggle in a volatile, crowded environment, which increases the risk of sudden escalation

• A perceived firearm during that struggle, which courts generally treat as an immediate deadly force threat

• The possibility that officers believed the individual was attempting to access or retain a weapon

• Reliance on warnings or reactions from fellow officers, such as hearing another officer shout that a gun was present

• The absence of a legal duty for police to retreat, unlike civilians in some states

The Gun

He identified the suspect’s weapon as a high-end SIG Sauer P320 AXG Combat.

The firearm, valued at approximately $2,000 including the SIG Romeo 2 optic, is a high-capacity 9mm pistol that was found on Pretti’s person during the violent struggle with federal agents.

Branca indentified the shooter’s gun as a ‘SIG 320 AXG Combat.’

“You can see it has a threaded barrel, just like the suspect’s gun. This image is from the SIG website, so it doesn’t have the optional optic on it, which this guy has, which by the way is a SIG optic, a Romeo 2 optic. 9mm pistol, high-capacity, this magazine might be the 20 or 21-round magazine the way it’s extending from the gun. This is not an inexpensive firearm.”

“This gun, just the gun without the optics, sells for anywhere between $1,000 and $1,200 retail. And the optic that’s on the shooter’s gun is typically another $500 or $600. So we’re pushing a couple thousand dollars’ worth of the pistol here, which is not a small amount of money on the gun.”

Unintentional Discharge

“Now, I’m going to mention because someone’s going to mention it, like it or not, SIG 320s have developed a reputation—deserved or not—of unintentional discharges, meaning if they’re dropped, sometimes they go off when they’re not supposed to.”

“They’re supposed to be drop-safe. But there’s been lots of press coverage and lawsuits about people just putting a primer in the gun and dropping it, the primer goes off.”

“That’s not supposed to happen. There’s been lots of lawsuits where people say, you know, I bumped the gun in the holster and it just went off and shot me in the leg, that kind of stuff. In this case, it’s beginning to look, at least initially, as if one of the ICE guys perceived the gun on the suspect, this gun, and took it off his person and was turning away, walking away with the gun to secure it from the suspect.”

“But what might have happened—remember, there’s a whole bunch of officers involved. They’re not all ethernet-cabled to each other’s brains. They’re all seeing different things. And one officer might have seen the gun and said the word “gun.” And that might have triggered that first shot by an officer, and then all the other officers begin shooting in response to that initial discharge.”

“That does not make the shooting unlawful. It would be an awful, but lawful shooting. So what’s required for the shooting to be lawful? The officers have to have a reasonable perception of an imminent threat of unlawful deadly force harm. That’s it.”

“If the answer to that is yes, this is a lawful shoot. They’re struggling with this gun. If they perceive this guy as being noncompliant with arrest, fighting with officers, as reaching for a weapon, they will have reasonably perceived an imminent threat of unlawful deadly force harm justifying their use of deadly defensive force. And their perception does not have to be correct.”

“Their perception has to be reasonable. We’re not required to make perfect decisions in self-defense, police too. We’re required to make reasonable decisions in self-defense.”

“If an officer heard a fellow officer shout “gun,” and officers are allowed to rely on the expertise of training on their fellow officers, they don’t personally need to see the threat themselves. If another officer with whom they’re working in that event shouts out that the triggering event has been observed by a fellow officer, that’s enough for another officer to resort to the use of deadly defensive force.”

“They’re allowed to rely on their reasonable perceptions of the other officers’ communications and conduct. Happens all the time because everyone knows the officers have different perspectives or seeing different things at any given time. Every officer does not personally need to see the threat. He has to have a reasonable belief that the threat is present.”

“That can be based on a reliance of what other officers communicate to him. So if one officer shouts “gun,” all the other officers are going to be prepared to, and some of them will shoot, as appears to be what happened here. When you get in a physical brawl with a bunch of armed law enforcement officers and you have a gun on your person, you’re running a serious risk of getting fatally shot in the course of that confrontation.”

Early media reports described the protester as unarmed. Video shows gun taken away from him.

“The moment they see that gun, they’ve reasonably perceived an imminent threat of deadly, unlawful force against them, and they’ll justifiably respond with deadly defensive force.”

“By the way, it’s not uncommon for police officers to shoot other police officers. Like two plainclothes police officers respond to a scene of violence, see each other with guns in hand, and one shoots the other.”

“And it’s a justified shooting because the shooter, although he wasn’t actually shooting a criminal and that other person was a fellow police officer unknown to him, was not actually a deadly force threat to him, he was reasonably perceived, given the circumstances, as an imminent unlawful threat of deadly force harm, and therefore it was justified to use deadly defensive force.”