Jordan Berman

The recording starts with Alex pretty yelling at the at the officers, you know, through their vehicle.

Now, many people have said this video is not real and that it's AI.

So what I will say is that Pretty's family's attorney has confirmed that Pretty is the man in the video.

The attorney said in a statement, quote, a week before Alex was gunned down in the street, despite posing no threat to anyone, he was violently assaulted by a group of ICE agents.

Nothing that happened a full week before.

A full week before could possibly have justified Alex's killing at the hands of ICE on January 24th, end quote.

And a representative for the family also said that they had been aware of that incident, that earlier incident, and that Pretty did sustain injuries, but that he did not get medical care.

And then there was also a witness on the scene that told the Minnesota Star Tribune that Pretty, quote, got slammed to the ground pretty hard, end quote.

So that video is not AI.

It has it has been confirmed as real by not only the family, but also the family's attorney.

As far as whether this video changes anything legally, not really.

So if you remember, we talked about in Monday's episode, law enforcement can only use deadly force if at the moment deadly force is used, there is a reasonable belief of imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury.

So

An earlier altercation by itself cannot be used to justify deadly force later, especially if the agents involved in the earlier incident were not the same agents who ultimately fired their guns.

It's true that courts will look at the totality of the circumstances when they're assessing the use of force, but that doesn't necessarily mean earlier unrelated incidents justify deadly force later.

The only way this new video footage could affect things is if the agent who fired the fatal shot last weekend knew at the time that Pretty had previously been involved in a confrontation and believed that history contributed to an imminent threat in the moment.

But even then, it wouldn't automatically justify using deadly force.

It would just be one factor that a court might consider.

Legally speaking, the focus of the inquiry, you know, it still comes back to the same question.

What did the officer reasonably believe was happening at the exact moment that the trigger was pulled?