There have been cases where an assault leading to a heart attack has resulted in a manslaughter conviction. This new evidence makes it very difficult for there to be any other outcome, although the fact that the assault was minor can be mitigation.

The BBC were initially talking about reasonable force, but that is also a red herring as there is no general right to use reasonable force against an innocent bystander; only to prevent a crime, make an arrest, or in self defence.

This is not just your average police brutality

I actually think that’s quite a naive point of view. I very vividly recall an arms fair protest in 2004 where I witnessed police tackle a man to the ground and kick him repeatedly in the stomach when he was lying curled up on the floor. Considering that there’s footage of Tomlinson being attacked from behind and thrown to the ground when his hands were in his pockets it isn’t beyond the realm of sanity to presume he could have been hit elsewhere on his body earlier. The problem is that the police always lie, they always conceal their badge numbers when they’re engaging in crowd control with protestors and the media has never cared before so nothing has been publicised until now. These issues aren’t new issues, it’s just that no one has died before.

Makes sense, so Tomlinson himself probably thought it was a heart attack ?

@32 & 34

Its quickly turning into a shit episode of quincy.

The Standard are trying to climb out of a huge credibility hole caused by the gap between their quite disgusting approach to covering the issues during the first two days, and reality as it became apparent over the next two days.

DoTW @30:

The pathologist who did the initial autopsy. Who, it was revealed the following day, had been censured for professional misconduct in an earlier case involving the police.

We are now in a position to speculate as to why that pathologist was chosen with such speed to perform this autopsy.

There’s a part of me, however, that feels uneasy about manslaughter charges being made against the officer. I think he should be charged with something, and certainly kicked out the force, but I’m just worried that this will change little within the Met. They will be able to point to this one bloke who acted out of line, rather than accepting that it’s an institutional problem and making real policy changes. What the officer did was wrong – but I’m sure it happened hundreds of times elsewhere that day.

The debate musn’t become centred on this one policeman and his actions if there’s to be a real change in policing in this country.

In these circumstances CHEST PAIN may develop related to cardiac ischaemia (i.e. reduced level of oxygen available to the heart through loss of circulating blood volume).

As I say this is all purely speculation but I can’t help thinking that there might have been a pre-existing condition to explain such rapid blood loss (enough to cause death in a few minutes) – so far we have the images and hearsay so I think we all have to be careful about any firm conclusion at this stage.

So it could well have been his stomach smacking against the ground that caused this bleed, if that were the case?

My answer to “The G20 reason to save journalism

We must protect journalists’ jobs – as G20 showed, we need them to challenge the official version of events”

http://willrhodesportmanteau.com/2009/04/17/the-money-shot-was-the-protesters-attacking-rbs/

I linked to the Guardian piece where that headline comes from.

Something positive would be paper journos doing their job – not sucking the official line tit.

We shall have to wait for the full report.

Oh, and if you’re organsing a demonstration in future expect to be told that mobile phones and cameras are prohibited, and that stewards who do not enforce the prohibition will spend a night or three in the cells.

If the mechanism was blunt abdominal trauma then there must have been a torrential internal bleed to cause such a rapid death.

I wonder if the abdominal aorta was torn ?
Classically this is a condition that mostly affects men who are long term smokers (resulting in vessel calcification) and have high blood pressure – once an aneurysm develops (ballooning of the vessel wall) a person is then like a walking time bomb since a relatively innocuous mechanism can cause the aorta to rupture (precipitating a huge bleed).

Only a third of such patients reach hospital alive (after rupture) and of those that do a further 20% die before staff can get them to theatre. If the surgeons do get you to the table only 40% will survive the operation.
This emergency has been likened to the blow out of a car tyre.

But yeah, the point is that they hit him without good reason; the fact that he subsequently died, although sad for him and his family, is irrelevant to the police’s conduct (unless the first coroner lied under police pressure, in which case everyone involved should go to jail for a long time. Perhaps I’m too naive but I doubt they’d be *that* blatant)

This is a big wake up call for the new commissioner.

We can only hope something positive comes out of this personal tragedy.

If you push someone onto concrete it’s not unreasonable to assume that they are going to hurt themselves badly. I wouldn’t expect them to die, but if I see someone fall over in the street like that I am going to assume that there is a small chance they might.