The lawyer representing Betty Shelby, the female officer who shot and killed Oklahoma man Terence Crutcher claims his client lost her hearing briefly in the course of the incident.
The lawyer claims Shelby suffered from an “auditory exclusion” during the shooting and wasn’t capable of hearing that her colleague Tyler Turnbough was readying to subdue Crutcher with his taser.
“She doesn’t have any recollection of that at all,” he mentioned. The lawyer defined an auditory exclusion as a “phenomenon that sometimes occurs in stressful situations because the person experiencing it is so focuses on the critical incident.”
Utilizing the impairment, Wood tried to justify Shelby’s actions as a result of her not having a cause to consider that Crutcher didn’t have a gun.
“If you think someone has a gun, you don’t get your Taser out,” he said. The probable cause affidavit for the case tells a different story, one her defense is trying to undo. “Shelby reacted unreasonably by escalating the situation from a confrontation with Mr. Crutcher, who was not responding to verbal commands and was walking away from her with his hands held up, becoming emotionally involved to the point that she overreacted.”
“The video….clearly showed that Terence Crutcher did not have a weapon, that Terence was not belligerent, that Terence had his hands up, that Terence was not a threat,” said attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons who reps the Crutcher family. “When we saw that video, we knew there was no reason for Terence to be shot down in the street.”
