January 25, 2014
By Journal Staff
Bernalillo County District Attorney Kari Brandenburg (click here) charged two Albuquerque police officers each with an open count of murder on Monday in the fatal shooting of a homeless camper in Albuquerque’s foothills last March.
Brandenburg’s office filed a criminal information that charges former Albuquerque police Detective Keith Sandy and SWAT team member Dominique Perez with murder in the death of James Boyd, a 36-year-old homeless man who was shot in March 2014.
District Attorney Kari Brandenburg said her office charged Sandy and Perez with an open count of murder because “we have probable cause.”
She would not discuss the specific facts of the case and said it would be up the judge hearing the case to determine which charge — ranging from
1st degree murder to aggravated assault — would apply in the case....
The police had control from the beginning. James Boyd was only a danger to himself. How could they do it? How could they kill a man with no options and isolated by the law into breaking it because there was simply no place for him to be.
Every human being needs a place to be, to breath, to see, to hear, to be who they are. To talk, to complain, to eat and sleep. When every place in the universe is denied to you, that is a death sentence. James Boyd was killed because no one gave him a place to be and the laws that governed demanded his death for trespassing in the only place he could find to sit and sleep. He was a danger to no one. He was denied a place to be by the laws of the land and the police carried those laws out without question or the ability to discern a man living is legal, but, a man dead is illegal. The police could have walked away, taken him to a jail cell for trespassing, but, they killed him because they gave themselves the right to do so.
