This Trial Was a Political Hit Job - Attorney Andrew Branca on the Schurr Mistrial (podcast) - Justin Barclay

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you went to a high school play, your local
high school was presenting guys and dollars, you would expect
the students to do a better job delivering that script
than this defense team did delivering their opening statement. And
a man's life was at stake here, sixty years in
prison was at stake here. I have to be honest.

(00:21):
I found it contemptible. She should have delivered that opening
statement at least as well as a high school drama student,
and she didn't even come close.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Get ready to strap any It's going to be a
heck of a riot. It's like drinking from a fire hose.
Never a dull moment.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
But yes, you'll hear the stories.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
You won't here anywhere else, and we appreciate you being
here with us failing today, I'm justin Barclay a welcommand
law of self defense. Andrew Brenka, if you've been watching
this trial, Officer Christopher sure the former Grand Rapids Police
Department officer. Lots of folks here in West Michigan, and

(00:58):
I'll cross they really have been watching this trial. And
I found the most fascinating way to watch it personally
is with Andrew, who is an expert in the field
and offering a really great commentary food all Andrew, thank
you so much the attorney here taking a time to
be here with us today.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
It's my pleasure. Happy to do it anytime.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
So, uh, you do this quite a bit. You've got
a book that you've written. You're helping people walk people
through there. It is, by the way, we're going to
get into that and let people because you get the
book for free, we'll tell you how to do it.
But the thing is, you're doing this not just with
this trial. You're doing this with a lot of trials,
and you you've got a lot of folks watching and
listening online. But that the thing that we've mostly recently

(01:43):
discovered you is because this trial has been such a
hot button issue here in our our areas. So I
want to start with this and then come maybe you
can like walk us through who you are, how you
get to what you're doing, and and and and maybe
you can walk us through this trial. But I just
want to start with this piece. I don't think that
this guy ever should have been charged. I don't think
Officer Sure ever should have been charged. I you know,

(02:04):
listening to what you're saying, and it's everything is very reasonable,
and I from what I'm hearing now, it looks like
much of the jury felt the same way.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
I'm hearing the same thing about the jury. Now, this
case should never have been brought. There's literally zero evidence
in this case inconsistent with self defense. In a case
where the prosecution knows full well going into it that
it's his burden to disprove self defense, not just disprove it,
but disprove it beyond any reasonable doubt, that was impossible

(02:38):
on the law and facts in this case. Now that said,
anytime you're in front of a jury, there's at least
a ten percent chance to get convicted, no matter how
innocent you are. Innocent people get convicted. That's just noise
in the system. So there was always a possibility Christopher
Shore could be convicted here, but it would not have
been on the law and the facts. It would have
been because of a biased jury or people not understanding

(03:00):
what the law was supposed to because of some of
this judge's rulings, some of her rulings on evidence really
biased this trial against this poor defendant who did nothing wrong.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Let's start Let's let's just start with that. You know,
some of the major things that stood out to you,
you know, in in maybe through the trial that that
because as we know now we've got hung jury, so
we got a mistrial. That means this thing, as we
now know, as it could be retried, what are the

(03:32):
odds of that? A lot of speculation question about that
and political motives in the climate, et cetera surrounding that.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
Well, I mean, the prosecution was always politically motivated. It
was not based on law and facts that the prosecutor
had to know unless he's incompetent that he didn't have
a real prospect of getting a conviction here on the
legal merit. So the only reason to bring the case
is political, And unfortunately prosecutors are elected officials. It is political.
If the population in Grand Rapids is trending more progressive,

(04:03):
he's going to have to move with that trend or
he won't be reelected. George Soros will drop a couple
hundred grand on somebody to oppose him, and he'll be
out of a job. So, if you're a political officer,
and that's what this prosecutor is, you have to kind
of follow the political trends of your community. Now, if
it were me, I have to be honest, I would
quit before I would bring a prosecution like this, but

(04:23):
some people they really want to keep their job.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
So if in fact this is retried, there are a
lot of issues throughout the trial. And okay, so we
know the defenses raised, the situation of the judge making
different facial expressions, rolling her eyes at a certain times,
especially when Officer sure was on the stand. Are these

(04:49):
good things going to play into the next trial and
are they going to have some ability to bring this
up before that happens.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
They'll have a chance to bring it up. I mean
they filed form emotion to have the judge basically recuse
herself from the case. Normally, what would happen if there
is a retrial, and that's entirely up to the prosecutor,
no one else makes that decision. If there is a retrial,
it would normally come back to the same judge who
tried it the first time. So there would have to
be some exception to the norm to prevent the second

(05:17):
trial from being in front of this same judge, who
is horrible by the way, She's just a bad judge.
Her rulings are not well reasoned. There's clear bias here.
She excluded evidence that was absolutely relevant to the defense,
just waving her hand and saying it's not relevant. I'm
hearing that she was changing the jury instructions on the lawyers.
Both says, the lawyers changing the jury instructions up to

(05:38):
hours before the jury was to be instructed. How is
the defense supposed to prepare of defense if they don't
even know what the instructions are going to be, that
the jury's going to get. Just a bad judge. She
shouldn't be. She shouldn't be overseeing any cases, much less
a case where a man is looking at life in
prison and she apparently has a clear bias against that

(05:58):
defendant's interest. The judge is supposed to be the impartial referee,
and for a judge to be doing things from the
bench that can suggest to the jury that they should
arrive at one verdict or another, it is just grossly
ethically wrong.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
Yeah. I know you mentioned there were a couple of
things throughout your streaming that you brought up, and I
thought those were worth taking a look at. So let's
start with and maybe you walk us through. But just
like from the very beginning, you know those things that
you said that she wouldn't allow in, which I thought

(06:33):
was kind of fascinating, the opening statements and through what
you know, walk us through what went wrong and where,
because I thought it was interesting. You weren't just critical
of the prosecution, you were also critical of the defense.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
They were awful. I'm sorry. I may meet these lawyers someday,
and if I do, I'm sorry. I just I don't
know what you're like. In other cases, they have a
good reputation, and if you look at your bio, it's
very impressive. But I can only judge them by what
I saw in this trial, and it was awful. It
was absolutely terrible. We can circle back to that though.
I mean your first question was about the judge. So

(07:07):
the judge allowed in evidence that was irrelevant and very prejudicial,
and then refused to allow in counter evidence from the defense.
So I'll give you an example. The only evidence that
should matter here, that's relevant is evidence at the moment
the officer had to make the decision whether or not
to use deadly defensive force, the moment of crisis, when

(07:29):
Patrick Leoya has put that taser in his dominant hand,
gripped it like a pistol, is turning to apply it
to the officer. That's what matters in terms of the
officer's decision in self defense, Not stuff that happened minutes earlier,
Not when he chose to do the foot pursuit, when
he chose to tackle Patrick Leoya, when he chose to

(07:49):
deploy his taser in self defense earlier in the fight,
the moment when Patrick Lilla grabbed the taser and never
let go of it for the rest of his life.
All that earlier stuff is irrelevant to a proper legal
analysis of this use of force decision. But the state
argued that, oh no, we have to consider all that
stuff as if an officer engaging in a foot pursuit

(08:11):
should not have the right to self defense if that
suspect tries to kill him later in the confrontation. That
is insane. So the judge should never have allowed that
argument in that the foot pursuit was unreasonable and therefore
the use of force later on was unreasonable when the
officer's life was at stake. But once having let that
evidence by the prosecution about the foot pursuit being unreasonable in,

(08:33):
she then denied the defense the opportunity to introduce evidence
to show that the foot pursuit was not only reasonable,
but this officer had previously received a commendation for engaging
in exactly the same kind of foot pursuit. She said
that was irrelevant. That is egregious. If you're going to
let in the bad argument from the prosecution, at the
very least you have to allow in the counter argument

(08:55):
from the defense.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
And again I'm watching thinking the same thing. I just
the whole the whole issue is a complete you know, look,
I think we can we can all say it's a tragedy,
But the question to me comes down to are we
going to allow police to be police? And and further,
I mean, as someone who you know lives in Kent

(09:20):
County here, and it's not just the city, it's the
whole county now that we have to many parts of
this county are not progressive, they're not liberal, they're not
trending this way in other parts of the cass We're
we're looking at this and there sheriffs that are in jeopardy,
and other police and other jurisdictions and cities as well.
So I think about this and I think to myself,

(09:41):
what do we want that outcome to be? What do
we want it to look like. And if I have
to defend myself in any way, shape or form in
the future, am I going to be charged by this prosecutor?
That's the question that I start to think about, and
I think people in this audience are really questioning that.
So I guess I asked you that is is do
you have a right to defend yourself in Kent County.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
Well, in any case of self defense, especially deadly force
self defense? The law says you can use deadly force
and self defense if you're facing you reasonably perceive You
don't even have to be right. It could be an
honest mistake or reasonable error, but you reasonably perceive that
you're facing an imminent threat of unlawful deadly force harm.
The law says you can use deadly force and self defense,

(10:25):
and you don't have to ask anyone's permission beforehand. You
don't have to get a slip of paper from a
judge saying it's okay for you to It's a very
powerful privilege of self defense. The trouble is all the
permission you don't have to have to ask for ahead
of time is made up by the inker the fact
other people are now evaluating whether they the deadly force

(10:51):
was reasonable. This includes the police, the Importantly, none of
them were there. None of them were physically present, none
of them were eyewitnesses, and none of them were you
being attacked and genuinely fearing that you were going to
die if you didn't defend yourself. That's why it's always
some possibility of getting convicted, no matter how innocent you are.

(11:15):
Noise in the system because ambiguity that these people weren't there.
And that's even before you get to a politically motivated persecution,
which is what this was.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
All right, this is probably a good time to bring
this up with people law self defense dot com. What
you do and why you do it, So give us
a heads up on this. I've been paying attention. I'm
very interested in this myself, because you know, I'm always
looking at that look. I have gone through all the
proper steps to do, the concealed carry and all those things,

(11:47):
and I think a lot of us are in this
audience particularly, are keenly aware of these things. But when
I took those classes and I took those steps, I realized, Okay,
this is just the beginning. I just did you know,
you're just kind of barely scratching the surface when it
goes through all the things that need need to be
aware of and and in the increasingly political environment climate

(12:09):
we have nowadays, you know, always looking to make sure
that I'm doing the right thing. And that's why I
was really interested Phyllisten, what do you do? What's the book?
And what do people need to know?

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Yeah, so it's kind of a good news bad news story.
And the bad news is most of what people think
they know about their legal privilege to use force and
self defense, and a lot of people know a lot,
but unfortunately most of what they know is bad. It's
bad information. They were taught it by people who didn't
really know what they were talking about. Because most people
who you would think would have expertise in self defense

(12:43):
law just don't. And that includes lawyers. Most lawyers. In
my three years of law school, we spent maybe five
minutes talking about self defense law. First year criminal law.
That was it. And even after a lawyer passes the bar,
unless he's a criminal defense lawyer, he has no need
to know any of this stuff. And even criminal defense
lawyers mostly defend criminals. That's the nature of the practice.

(13:06):
That's just the way it is. So if you talk
to criminal defense attorney and you ask him in your
entire twenty or thirty year career, and I'm in my
thirty fourth year as a as an attorney, how many
good guy cases of self defense, genuine cases of self
defense have they had? Because they've argued self defense thousands
of times, but normally it's no sense claim itself. It's

(13:28):
a bad guy who just doesn't want to go to prison.
Defense have they had in twenty thirty years? They'll tell
you four to five. I mean, it's just really hard
to get good at something you only do four or
five times in twenty or thirty years. Most police are
not well trained in self defense law. They're trained by
their academies and their departments what they need to know

(13:48):
to protect the department against civil liability, but not to
protect themselves against criminal liability, which obviously is what for example,
christash Shore is facing here. Most firearms self defense instructors
and I listen, I'm a NRA certified instructor rifle pistol
personal protection. I have been for decades. We're just not

(14:09):
taught this stuff at a high level. And what happened
with me is in the nineteen nineties. I was a
new lawyer. I'd been admitted to practice. I was starting
my law practice. I was also a lifelong member of
the gun community. I started competitive shooting as a kid,
small bore rifle. When I became an adult, I started
pistol shooting, IDPA other similar practical pistol sports. And so

(14:30):
my community knew me. They knew I was a shooter,
and they knew I was a lawyer, and they would
ask me questions like, hey, Andrew, when am I allowed
to use my gun to defend myself in this kind
of situation? And I realized I didn't actually know the answer.
I mean, I knew kind of a very general answer,
but I couldn't contextualize it for specific facts of a
specific scenario. That, by the way, is true of most
self defense instructors. If you go to a CCW class

(14:53):
and you asked that guy teaching the class that same question,
when can I use my gun under this kind of circumstance,
invariably he's to say, I'm not a lawyer, and it
depends it depends. Well, that's not a very useful answer.
And I thought, and I was walking around with a gun,
I had a concealed carry permit. I was carrying a
gun around and I realized, holy cow, I don't actually
know what the rules are. So I decided I better

(15:15):
learn the rules. And I found there was no good resource,
even for lawyers to know what the actual law self
defense was. I had to do primary legal research. I
had to read court decisions, jury instructions, statutes, and I
was living in Massachusetts at the time, and I did that.
But Massachusetts is a very small state. You drive thirty
minutes in any direction. You're in New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut,

(15:36):
Rhode Island. So I thought, well, I better learn those
states self defense laws too, because I'm in them every month.
And when I did that, I began to see a
pattern the self defense law. Of course, each state has
its own statutes and court cases and such, but the
underlying principles were very similar, and I thought, man, if
it's similar for these five states, I wonder if it

(15:57):
is for all fifty states. And I did the primary,
very illegal research for all fifty states. And it turns
out that self defense law in the US, any US
jurisdiction is based on just five legal principles. That's it,
and sometimes not even that many, often not that many,
but the most is five, which is great news because

(16:18):
self defense law can often seem like kind of a
black box. You put facts in one end, you crank
a handle, you get some kind of answer out the other,
but you don't really know how the answer was arrived at.
There's not five hundred things you need to know about
self defense law. There's not even fifty. There's only five.
And once I realized there was only five, I realized, well,
I can apply those five in any state in the country.

(16:38):
And that's when we transitioned our law practice from being
a traditional criminal defense practice to being a consulting practice.
So I consult to other attorneys all over the country
when they have clients who've been involved in the use
of force event like Christopher Sure and are now facing
legal liability.

Speaker 2 (16:53):
So what is the membership? Obviously the book we got
people in the chat telling us today, Hey, I got
the book today and you know, jumping in on that.
But what's your membership? How does that work?

Speaker 1 (17:09):
So we have a couple levels of membership. We have
a very basic membership that gets your access to like
our blog post, our legal analysis that's for members only.
Then we have a higher level of membership, which is
what you need to have in order to have me
consult on your case. So we don't take outside consults anymore.
We have what we call a Platinum level of membership.
If you're a Platinum member. When we took outside consults,

(17:30):
we would charge a minimum of ten thousand dollars to
do a consult on the case. Now we only provide
consults for our Platinum members and they get that console
for free. It doesn't cost them anything, and not just
for the trial. For the trial, if there's a retrial
where there again, if there's an appeal, we're there again.
We cover them until every legal avenue has been exhausted

(17:50):
and they get it for free. The catch is they
do need to be a Platinum member or we just
can't provide the legal service. So we get calls every
week in my office from people who are involved in
the US Force event and then they google and they
find us and they become a Platinum member like three
days after the event, and you know they'd like to
get a consul. It doesn't work that way. You have
to be a Platinum member first. But I always encourage

(18:10):
people before they even consider becoming a Platinum member, learn
about us, watch our blog posts, get our free book.
You know, develop a sense of whether you feel you
know we have the expertise, which we do, but you
should convince yourself of that, whether we have the expertise
that would be valuable to you, that would make the
difference to you if you were in Christopher Schuer's shoes

(18:32):
and looking at spending the rest of your life in
a cage. Christopher sure is thirty four years old. He'll
probably live to ninety six decades in a cage, is
what he's looking at. If he gets convicted of this
murder charge. There's no question this judge will sentence him
to the maximum. What's it worth not to have that risk?
That's what we provide through our Platinum you.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
Know, I want to just talk because you're talking about
Attorney Andrew Breko with us right now low Self Defense
dot Com. You're talking about officers sure In and how
young he is and how much time he's got, and
it just I think it underscores for me too a
lot of what may may or may not have made
it into the trial about his background. And I remember

(19:13):
three years ago when this first came up and learning
about who he was and what the media was trying
to twist the case into, which is a whole other
issue in the political nature of all this. I mean,
this guy was a boy scout. If you look at
his background, he was missionary. I mean, he was in Africa.

Speaker 1 (19:34):
And the most common thing in the world is these
people are demonized in the press for a year or
two years or three years before their trial. One of
the most common things I hear from clients in cases
I consult on is the client says, I can't believe
I'm getting prosecuted for self defense because they know they're innocent,
they know they did only what was necessary, and they

(19:54):
can't believe the entire power of the state is being
brought against them to put them in the cage for them.
One of these guys are younger than Christopher Shore. If
you look at the George Zimmerman case, he was younger
than Christopher Shore, and he was a genuinely nice guy.
Everybody in his community loved him. Kyle Rittenhouse much younger
than Christopher Suore. Everybody, if you've ever met Kyle, Kyle

(20:17):
is just the nicest, sweetest young man you could ever
possibly meet. They were going to put those guys in
prison for the rest of their lives too. Can you
imagine a sixteen or seventeen year old Kyle Rittenhouse is
going to spend eighty years in prison for nothing. He
did nothing that was inconsistent with lawful self defense. The
same with George Zimmerman. But these politically motivated prosecutors, they're

(20:40):
hoping for that chance conviction, not on the legal merits,
not on the facts, but that noise in the system
I've been talking about, because there's always some possibility they
might get the conviction. And by the way, it's a
win win for them. Either they win because they get
a conviction and then they can say I told you so,
this guy was guilty all along. Or they don't get
the conviction, but they get the polite to go capital.

(21:01):
They can go back to their progressive community and say, hey,
I fought for you, I did everything I could, and
then they get reelected, which is what they really want.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
What's your sense of what happened here, particularly in this case,
we have, you know, a few days of jury deliberation
what looks to me like a pretty open and shutcase.
I could see how the jury might get confused with
a couple of things that happened inside the courtroom, but
they knew early on. We got the report back. I

(21:31):
believe it was like the next morning after they went home,
but they were deadlocked, and I get I kind of
feel like maybe not much changed between then and now.
And if it's if the numbers hold true from what
I'm hearing, and I have no idea to know, but
the actually defense said today it was it was maybe
one or two holdouts. And that's what I was hearing,
is it was one holdout. Sounds like they they they

(21:55):
they said, we want to quit on both not just
the murder too, but also the manslaughter. And we can
get into why they brought that as well later, But
what's your sense of what happened?

Speaker 1 (22:08):
Like you, I'm hearing the same things. It was overwhelmingly
for acquittal or one or two holdouts, which is part
of the risk of going to trial, right, that's part
of the noise in the system. I mean, he got
a hung jury. That's a huge win for Christopher. Sure.
By the way, despite how little I think of his
legal defense, they did secure for him a hung jury.
He's not going to prison for the rest of his life.
That is a huge win and maybe he won't be

(22:31):
retried and then it's all over. That's great, he can
go on with the rest of his life. But a
hung jury, come back a second time with a much
more competent legal defense team, and he should have an
even better outcome the second time around. What happened here
is you know, I call these bad outcome cases. There
are law enforcement shootings where you just look at it

(22:53):
and you're like, well, it just had to happen that way.
Like imagine a school shooting. Right, somebody's in a school
shooting a bunch of kids. The cops come in, they
have to shoot that active shooter. You're like, well, I mean,
there was nothing else to do, right, It's an open
and shut case here we have. It's not quite like
that in the sense that it's not hard to imagine
that if things had gone a little differently, Patrick Leeyo

(23:15):
would still be alive today, that he was making a
bunch of, you know, bad decisions. His blood alcohol was
point two nine point two nine. That that is smoked.
I mean, it's I have to say, it's not the
highest blood alcohol I've ever seen in the case I've
worked on. But that's three and a half times a
legal limit, so that he wasn't making good decisions is
not necessarily surprising. I can guarantee you nobody wishes more

(23:37):
than Christopher Shore that Patrick Leeya was still alive today.
Obviously his family wants. Everybody would wish he was not dead.
So it's kind of a what I call a bad
outcome case. You wish it didn't have to turn out
this way. And we had some very awkward facts where
you look at them without understanding the context, and it
looks terrible. A white police officer shot a black suspect

(24:00):
the back of the head. If that's all you know,
it looks horrific. So you have to make the effort
to learn the fuller context of what happened. That's why
the public is I'm sure many of the public are like,
oh my god, this was a miscarriage of justice. I
can't believe this cop, this killer cop, got led off
this way, right, because they don't know the fuller context.
Most people don't watch the full trial, most people don't

(24:21):
look at the actual evidence. And of all you know
is white cop shot black suspect in the back of
the head, it just sounds terrible. And because people have
that emotional response that gets converted into political energy. So
the prosecutor himself maybe looking at the evidence of saying, well,
crip's on the facts in the law, this was a
good shoot. But I'll never get reelected unless I go

(24:43):
after this defendant because the people who are voting and
the people who are activists or are going to energize
them are all they're going to say a thousand times
over is white cop shot black suspect in the back
of the head, and I'll lose reelection. And that might
be why he felt compelled to take the case of trial.
It certainly was not.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
We have a very radical state attorney general here too.
One of the theories that I've heard talked about is
that this county prosecutor took the case because he felt
like he could make sure that the officer had a
more fair trial, rather than if the circus that could
have turned into if the if the attorney general, who's
a Democrat, would have taken it. Now, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
I don't believe that this prosecutor.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
Didn't inside of the inside of a lot of what
you showed, and I was very turned off with what
I saw at times from this man, who I know
and has always been fair and we've had great conversations before.
But I was very disappointed a lot I think a
lot of people were, So I got to ask you this.

(25:46):
Questions that have come up, if if, if this does
get retried, if the prosecutor, the county prosecutor says, and
I don't know, maybe this is a Michigan thing, er
you won't know either. But if he decides he doesn't
want to retry it, can the Michigan State Attorney General?
Can she decide that it needs to be retried.

Speaker 1 (26:06):
You know, I couldn't tell you that those rules are
so state specific, I couldn't tell you they vary a
lot from state to state. Unfortunately, you know, you'd like
to think if the local prosecutor doesn't do it, it's over.
But like in the George Zimmerman case, for example, down
in Florida, that local prosecutor quit rather than charge George Zimmerman.
It was so obviously a case of lawful self defense.

(26:26):
And then the governor di just appointed a special counsel
to come in and prosecute George Zimmerman from from out
of the district. So sometimes the state takes over in
the Ahmad arbery case, the jogger case in Florida with
the McMichaels where they chased them in their truck. In
that case, all the local prosecutors they all looked at
the evidence. They were like, no, this this looks like
self defense to us. So the State of Georgia just sending,

(26:48):
you know, special prosecutors from Atlanta to try the case.
So sometimes the state doesn't take over, but the extent
to which they can do that very so much from
state to state. I couldn't tell you what the case
is from Michigan. You need to talk to.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
A Michigan suspected. We got a couple of quick questions
from folks here in the chat that are watching tonight. Again,
I want to make sure you have the opportunity to
go to loss self defense dot com and the book
is free. All you have to do is pay the
shipping and handling, which is great. Get the resource in.

Speaker 1 (27:19):
This book, this book. You can get the book at
law of Self Defense dot com slash get the book
pretty easy to remember. Just get the book is all
you have to really remember, and all we ask is
that you cover the cost of shipping. Check it out
on Amazon. It's five star rated, but they'll charge you
twenty five dollars with the book and shipping and handling.
We only asked you to cover the cost of shoes.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
Junk Man wants to know since it was obvious the
judge was rather biased, we kind of covered some of
this towards the prosecution. When if it does get retried,
can the defense ask for a different judge or a
change of venue? Is there any any help that they
can get there?

Speaker 1 (27:55):
I mean, they can do all those things, but the
trouble is, all these judges are kind of like a
little club together, and they all treat each other professionally
and with respect and for you'd be asking her boss
basically to remove her from the case, which doesn't look good,
and put another judge in her place. That does happen sometimes,

(28:17):
but it's a difficult thing to get the boss judged
to do. With respect to a change in venue, that
can happen too. You can ask for that. I think
that the prospects here are not terrible. In many high
profile cases, like the Derek Chauvin trial, for example, they
tried to get that changed jurisdiction multiple times, and every

(28:39):
time the judge would look at them and say, listen,
with all the coverage this has gotten, where in the
state would I move this to work. It wouldn't have
the same level of coverage. It would make no difference
to change venue. I think we have a different energy here,
in part because of the time delay, the three years
between when the event happened and this trial here. There
may be a better prospect of getting a change in venue,

(29:00):
But I gotta be honest, I'm not sure it would
make that big a difference. I think in this venue,
with this jury pool, you had a pretty good shot.
I mean I heard it. I'm hearing it's ten to
two or eleven to one for acquittal on all the charges.
That's not bad.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
You know, same thing. I heard, the exact same numbers.
And again, no way to know for sure will they
be able to pull them. I know the defense talk
to them a little bit. Do you think they're going
to get some feedback on from some of these and
what we hear from some of these jurors.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
Well, they're not polled, so polling would happen in the
courtroom on the record, the judge would ask them. Typically
it's when you actually get a guilty verdict the judge
wants to make sure everybody actually voted for guilty, and
they'll pull them that way. Here, it's more like an informal,
casual conversation between the jury and the prosecutor and the
jury and the defense. And most of the time the

(29:56):
lawyers don't like to share details. They treat it as
of a pseudo confidential conversation. In other words, they don't
want to make the juris regret that they had the
conversation with them, so they tend to hold back those
kinds of details. But you know, I mean, the important
stuff tends to leak anyway, like just like you and
I have.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
So what are some of the things that you think
are maybe going to come up that these jurors, I mean,
it's hard to know. We're just guessing here, but what
are some of the things that you stood out with
your experience of juries that you think made the difference here?
And why couldn't they get those two across the line?
Is it was it just a matter of maybe ideology

(30:37):
or you know, we get some more.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
Yeah, I think it was ideology. So, like I say,
I think people once they heard there was at least
one juror who heard. When she heard a white police
officer shot a black suspect in the back of the head,
that was it for her. Nothing else mattered in her mind.
There was not possibly anything that could excuse them from happening,
and she didn't care. I'm saying she but I don't

(31:01):
know the gender. I'm just assuming that women make poorer
decisions than men. I guess so. But whoever, it was
just decided that if that was the facts to which
the officer admitted, right, I mean, Christopher Shore is saying, yeah,
I'm a white officer that was a black suspect and
I shot him in the back of the head and
killed them. I mean, that's undisputed. Once she heard that,

(31:22):
she was like, there are no facts or a law
I could possibly hear that would ever make me a
quit someone to do that. That's not a reason position.
That's an emotional position. But if someone holds it tightly
enough that you're never going to change your mind, it
becomes you know.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
I heard you talking about the people getting on the
jury and some of these folks making it on and
it sounded like I heard the prosecutor talking about how
many opportunities they had to strike different jurors, and he
didn't use all his and defense didn't use all theirs.
And I thought you made a very interesting point about
some of these folks hiding, I specifically, if they're very

(31:57):
ideologically lined to the left, hiding who they are and
what they really feel about these subjects.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
Yeah. So there are people in any community who feel
a very powerful, almost religious like motivation to seek social justice.
And if they see a case like this and they
believe that, you know, a white officer shot a black
suspect in the back of the head, and that's an
injustice that must be corrected, and they have an opportunity
to correct it, they will absolutely lie, cheat and steel

(32:27):
to get put on that jury. So they will misrepresent themselves.
They will say that I have never formed an opinion.
I don't know. I see this in cases all the time.
It's one of the things that makes a well funded
defense different than a less well funded defense. A well
funded defense it's not just the lawyers in the courtroom,
you see, they have a big staff behind them and
they're actually googling all these potential drawers and looking like

(32:49):
at their Facebook pages and their social media, and this
jury that's sitting there under oath, saying no, I've never
formed an opinion. I've seen cases where they have a
Facebook page that says linn wh this defendant, and unless
that was exposed, you would never know that, and you
might let that person on the jury and then you're
stuck with them for the whole trial. It's too late.

(33:09):
So one of the reasons of well financed legal defense
is so important is you have the resources to guard
against that kind of you know, lying juror who's basically
like an ied in the jury deliberations that you can
never over.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
What do you think the cost of this defense was?
For sure? How much do you think it was?

Speaker 1 (33:31):
You know, I don't know what these lawyers charge. And
it's kind of complicated because it was three years in
the waiting but a lot of that three years was
appellet work. So he went to a preliminary hearing, Christopher
Suore did, and the hearing judge said, there's probable cause
here to go to trial on a murder charge. I
would disagree with that. I don't believe it was even close,
but nevertheless, that's what the hearing judge said. And then

(33:53):
his defense team, who were the same lawyers on appeal
as for trial, which is very unusual. By the way,
they decided to appeal that to the Court of Appeals
and then appeal it to the Michigan State Supreme Court.
And appellate appellate practice is very intermittent. You know, you
file emotion and then you do nothing. You wait for months,
so you're not racking up billable hours. You're waiting for

(34:13):
a response from the appellate court. You lose, you file
emotion with the State Supreme Court, you wait months for
something to happen. So it's kind of hard. It's different
than if it was like, you know, eight months of
trial prep going a trial, then you know it's super expensive.
I would expect the eight months leading up to this
trial should have been super expensive. You wouldn't know it.
Judging by the trial performance of these lawyers. They seemed

(34:34):
completely unprepared. To me, the defense lawyer who did the
opening statement for this defendant. The opening statement is where
you know durwors are not legal experts, right, You're not
going to convince them with technical legal arguments. Human beings
learn and are convinced by stories. That's why movies are
so powerful, books are so powerful. The Bible is so powerful.

(34:57):
The Bible is the collection of stories. And when you're
trying to sway a jury from a guilty to a
non guilty verdict, which is what you want as a defense,
you have to tell them a story. You have to
look them in the eye. Now, it's a technical story
in the sense that it's based on law and it's
based on facts. You have to have those components. But
on top of that, like icing on a cake, you

(35:18):
layer a story, a narrative, on top of that, something
that gets them emotionally engaged. On your client side of
this event, this tragic event where a human being died,
and that opening statement that story frames provides the context
for everything those drawers will hear for the entirety of

(35:38):
the trial. It is absolutely critically important. And this opening
statement by these defense lawyers. The person who made that
opening statement, she looked she was reading it off her iPad.
I swear I looked at it, and every four times
a minute she was looking back down at her iPad.
They had three years to prepare this opening statement. If

(36:00):
you went to a high school play, your local high
school was presenting guys and dollars, you would expect the
students to do a better job delivering that script than
this defense team did delivering their opening statement. And a
man's life was at stake here, sixty years in prison
was at stake here. I have to be honest. I

(36:21):
found it contemptible. She should have delivered that opening statement
at least as well as a high school drama student,
and she didn't even come close.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
You know, I really agree Attorney Andrewbrenco with this right now.
One of the things that I to him, I don't
know the law, you know, like you know like you do,
but I know people, and I felt the same way.
I thought. This case is very simple. I think we
need to hear more about who Christopher sure is, what
he was going through. I wanted to hear more from
him about how he was in fear for his life

(36:52):
and just those elements of he's in fear for his life,
he thinks he's going to die at this moment. He
had no other choice than he had to do it.
It's simple, why did we Maybe there's a reason for this,
but why do we get clouded with all the you know,
the different expert and there were some that I know
you you gave them a lot of grief as well,
which I think was interesting too. There were something I

(37:14):
was finding that as well. Why are we even hearing
from these people? I just felt like it confuses the jury.

Speaker 1 (37:22):
Well, the prosecution had to confuse the jury because of
the prosecution. Let the if the prosecution properly let the
issue be, what was the officer perceiving at the moment
he made the decision to go to the gun, it
would be done. I mean, that's why there's no probable
cause here in my opinion. So the prosecution had to
change the conversation from the legally appropriate conversation what was

(37:47):
happening in that moment to the inappropriate conversation did this
officer should he have allowed himself to be murdered because
he engaged in a foot pursuit earlier? In the confrontation
that is madness. And when his experts, when the state
experts were up there, they were asked on cross examination,
so did this officer violate Grand Rapids Police Department policy

(38:09):
to deviolate Michigan law? And the experts said they looked
right at him and said, oh, we don't even consider that.
We didn't even look at Grand Rapids Police Department policy.
We didn't look at Michigan law. We're not here to
talk about that. We're here to talk about this imaginary
book that does not exist. I can assure you that
they call generally acceptable police practices. This is a myth.

(38:31):
It's a complete fabrication. There is no such book. No officer,
no law enforcement officer ever in the history of the
United States, including Christopher Shore, was ever trained on some
mythical thing called generally accepted police practices. They are trained
on the policies and practices of their department, and that
has to be what they're judged by. But Christopher sure

(38:52):
didn't violate any of his department's policies. He didn't violate
any Michigan law. So you can't attack him on that.
You have to pretend that he was supposed to know
magically this body of generally accepted police practices and know
somehow that he did something that violated that. It was
absolutely an insane argument. The judge should never have allowed

(39:14):
that testamenty and credit to the defense. They objected. They
moved to have that evidence excluded.

Speaker 2 (39:20):
But the judge just Attorney Andrew Breka the law of
self It's law of self defense dot com one last
question for folks in the chat here, So if they
do decide to retry this, and this goes along with
the question earlier that I really wanted to ask us.
I felt like we all sort of saw when the
manslaughter charge was dropped in it really felt like the

(39:41):
prosecution decided, after everything that came out, that they didn't
have a shot and they kind of knew it, and
that's why they dropped this. And although it's not you know,
it's not rare, as you've noted, but that sort of
could they retry on the manslaughter if they decided to retry.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
I mean, just on the mass well, they know they
wouldn't do that. I mean, I guess he could. The
prosecutor could do that if you wanted to, but the
judge open the door, just go right back to murder.
So if you're the prosecutor, why wouldn't you do that? Yeah,
I mean, frankly, I think I think the manslaughter is

(40:19):
actually a harder argument. So it's it's voluntary manslaughter, which
means heat of passion. So the classic example is somebody
comes home and finds their spouse in bed with somebody else,
and in a heat of rage, they pull out a
gun and they shoot him dead. That's different than a
cold blood of killing. A cold blood of killing where
you just you walk into a liquor store to rob it,

(40:39):
you shoot the clerk in the face and you take
the money. That's just a deliberate cold blood of killing.
That's murder. The law says, if you committed the killing
not in cold blood, but in hot blood, we won't
call it murder. We'll mitigate it down to manslaughter. That
was what was presented here, and it's not unusual for
like two men in a fistfight, like mutual combat, two

(40:59):
guys to say I had to settle their differences with
physical combat, that over the course of the fight, one
of them realizes they're losing, and maybe they get scared,
maybe they get angry, and they whip out a gun
and shoot the guy that we're having a fistfight with.
That would be a heat of passion defense in the
context of a fight. And of course there was a
fight here, so there is like a sentilla of bases

(41:20):
for going for a voluntary manslaughter. But the only actual
evidence in this case was when Christopher Shore took the
witness stand and his lawyer asked them what were you mad?
Were you angry? And he said no, I was just
trying to make an arrest like I do every day
when I'm a police officer. And that's negative evidence of
heat of passion manslaughter. And the prosecution never provided any

(41:44):
positive evidence none. So I don't think that drury instruction
should have been allowed. I don't think there's literally any
evidence to support it. But we're dealing with the judge
that we had in this case, and she was going
to allow anything that was helpful for the prosecution and
nothing that was helpful for them.

Speaker 2 (41:58):
Andrew Bank of the attorney here law self defense dot Com.
We'll wrap and I will we'll stay close because I
know we've got more development. So we encourage people to
go follow you and find you online so they can
stay up to date with what you've got coming as
far as streams and everything else. But again, let folks
know where they can get the book and how they
can stay in touch with you.

Speaker 1 (42:19):
Sure you can get the book at law self defense
dot com, slash get the book pretty easy, And I
do a lot of stuff on YouTube. Go to YouTube
and just search for a Law of Self Defense and
you'll find me there. A lot of stuff I do.
There is political commentary, the law, fair against Trump, Supreme
Court decisions, all that kind of stuff. But it's fun.
Check it out.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
It's free me as well, absolutely always applied. No, you've
got some new fans here in West Michigan, Da habits
as people I started talking about you. I just happened
to find you. I think it was on Twitter X
or whatever, and I was looking for information about the
trials is trying to get updates throughout the day, and
I just saw you streaming and I started telling people, now,

(42:58):
you got to watch this guy. And as they said, yeah,
we are watching this guy. We love him so and
we got some fans out here. Thank you for all
your hard work. We really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
Sure, thank my pleasure.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
Thank you for being here today. Don't forget to share.
Follow me everywhere at mister justin Barkley on all the
platforms at justin Barkley dot com. You get my good
news letter. We can stay in touch no matter what
happens with big tech and social media. And let's continue
to get these stories out so that people can hear
the truth.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
Why does that matter?

Speaker 2 (43:27):
Well, when you hear the truth and you can make
the best decision for you and your families, and that's important.
And no matter what happens, folks, my piece, my home
doesn't come from my circumstances. Certainly doesn't come from the
people that are in the White House in Washington, d C.
My piece, my hope, my joy is from some place altogether.

(43:47):
Much better keep your eyes focused on him. God is
still on the front. God bless.

Speaker 3 (43:57):
I'm doctor Kirk Elliott, founder of Kirk Elliot Precious Metals.
After being in the industry for more than a decade,
I knew there was a better way. It's an exciting
time to invest in gold and silver with the most
significant bull market I've ever seen. But please don't overpay
for your stuff. At k EPM, we focus on low
cost bullion only and we don't charge a commission when

(44:19):
you sell. We would love to connect with you, so
call our office at seven two oh six oh five
thirty nine hundred

Speaker 2 (44:26):
Or go to goldwisin dot com today

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This Trial Was a Political Hit Job - Attorney Andrew Branca on the Schurr Mistrial (podcast)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}This Trial Was a Political Hit Job - Attorney Andrew Branca on the Schurr Mistrial (podcast)