They Burn Babies Don’t They?

Cops in Geogia burned a 19 month old baby with a pyrotechnic grenade in a drug raid that has so far ( 3 days later) turned up no drugs – (this link has a picture of the burned baby – it will make you furious or retch. Or both).

Habersham County, Georgia, Sheriff Joey Terrell feels bad that his deputies horribly burned a toddler by tossing a “distraction device” (a.k.a. a “flash bang” grenade) into the playpen where he was sleeping during a drug raid on Wednesday morning. “The baby didn’t deserve this,” Terrell concedes in an interview with AccessNorthGa.com. “The family didn’t deserve this. This family was displaced from another home down here and apparently just moved in.” If his deputies had known there were children in the home, he says, they would not have used the grenade. But given what they knew, Terrell insists, they acted appropriately:

Ah but the appropriate acting Terrell promises, “Is it going to make us be more careful in the next one? Yes ma’am, it is. It’s gonna make us double question.” And I’m sure they won’t be tossing grenades into playpens as often as they used to.

Here is a round up of stories on the raid. Some of them have graphic pictures of the baby who is in an induced coma to make his recovery more likely.

AccessNorthGeorgia has a detailed interview of the officer in charge.

WaPo – Radley Balko

Reason

CNN has video of the mother and the raid leader

Update:

I just have to quote a bit from Balko’s piece. Emph added.

Several years ago, CNN ran a special report about three FBI agents who suffered severe injuries when a defective flashbang prematurely detonated in an SUV. The article focused on the agents’ injuries and on the company that made the defective device. Missing from the piece, however, was one critical bit of information: The device that caused the injuries to those agents is used by American police against American citizens every day of the year. Worse yet, it’s primarily used during the service of drug warrants. Which means it’s used not only to enforce laws against nonviolent, consensual activity, but it’s used against people who are still merely suspects. When a police forces uses a flashbang in this way, it is intentionally inflicting injury on someone who not only has yet to be convicted of a crime, in most cases the person has yet to even be charged — and of course anyone else who happens to be in the home at the time.

And in the comments Jccarlton says:

Somehow I think that bashing doors down by heavily armed troops was one of the things the founders were concerned with.

The Declaration:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

and:

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

and:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: