Hiding Behind A Suit and Robe

This is not just the story of Deputy Anthony Gann facing 20 years in prison for following his policy and training, but also about a much darker issue affecting law enforcement across the country. 

This episode is the opinion of Travis Yates. But it's an opinion you must hear. You can read the accompanying article here. 

Join Our Tribe of Courageous Leaders:

Get The Book
Get Weekly Articles by Travis Yates
Join Us At Our Website
Get Our 'Courageous Leadership' Training
Join The Courageous Police Leadership Alliance

Chapters

• 0:00 Why This Story Still Hurts
• 1:25 The Case And Pursuit Unfold
• 4:10 Split-Second Judgments Under Stress
• 8:30 From Policy Review To Prosecution
• 12:20 Grand Jury As A Political Shield
• 16:40 Building The Defense Team
• 20:45 The “Sudden Quarrel” Charge Explained
• 24:20 Depositions And Legal Maneuvers

Transcript

Why This Story Still Hurts

Announcement 0:01

Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Gates, where leaders find the insights, advice, and encouragement they need to lead courageously.

The Case And Pursuit Unfold

Split-Second Judgments Under Stress

From Policy Review To Prosecution

Grand Jury As A Political Shield

Building The Defense Team

The “Sudden Quarrel” Charge Explained

Depositions And Legal Maneuvers

Travis Yates 0:12

I've waited a few weeks to record this episode because quite frankly, I was so upset. I knew I needed to wait. I actually wrote an article about this, and it set in draft mode for a couple of weeks because the first draft, certainly I would have been sued for defamation, even though everything I said was true. But the cowards I'm about to talk about, that's how they operate. But it's something that I think anyone in the leadership space, anyone that wants to learn about leadership, especially in law enforcement, you need to understand what is going on, not only in this specific incident, but nationwide. Now, the accompanying article here uh is on my Substack, courageouspoliceleader.com. And um you don't have to remember that domain. If you go to Travisyage.org and you see articles, that leads over to all those articles. And you can subscribe there on Substack and you get these articles sent to you automatically. It kind of keeps me from spamming everybody with emails and things like that. So it's been really helpful. We have several thousand people that follow that article, those articles. And this latest article is called Hiding Behind a Suit and Robe. And I wanted to just sort of verbally not just read the article, but kind of maybe give you some insights. The article didn't go into and the background of it. So this started almost a year ago. I was contacted by an attorney out of Omaha, Nebraska, and there was a deputy that had been involved in a deadly force incident, and he had been prosecuted by the district attorney. I'm gonna give you the quick foundation of this prosecution because, quite frankly, uh that would take hours to just go into details about what actually happened. But essentially what happened was this deputy had had contact with a suspect a couple weeks prior to this incident. He stopped the car, the car came to a stop. They had an altercation. Uh, the deputy thought he saw uh drug paraphernalia and saw evidence of methamphetamine in the car. The guy takes off in the car and a vehicle pursuit ensues. The deputy chases him and then the pursuit was called off. And a couple weeks later, the deputy was on the highway and he sees this car. He pulls up beside the car, he identifies the driver as the same suspect. The deputy, his name's Deputy Anthony Gann. That's public knowledge. There's news stories on this, so I'm not concerned about giving his name out. By the way, what a fine young man, young deputy in his 20s, very articulate, uh, very smart. He actually called the DA on the phone while he was driving, probably something I wouldn't have done and said, Hey, I've got I'm behind this car again. Can I go ahead and stop the car and arrest him for this last offense? And the DA said, Well, go ahead and get new probable cause and have an interaction with him. So he does. He gets a violation behind the wheel, behind the car, and he goes to stop the car for that traffic violation, and the car takes off. Probably not surprising based on the initial encounter. And this pursuit lasted for seven minutes plus, pretty crazy pursuit, high speeds, long way down the interstate. And at some point, the car comes to a stop. The car basically starts smoking and he couldn't drive it anymore, and it comes to a stop right in the middle of the interstate. And about the time the car comes to a stop, a passenger, a female, goes rolling out of the car. Now, you got to put yourself in any use of force encounter, you have to put yourself in the mindset of the officer. So, what are you thinking here, right? And the officer actually testified, he didn't know. He was like, Is she a victim? Is she a kidnapping victim? Is she part of this? Is she an associate? It all goes to the state of mind of the officer when you talk about the human factors involved in making a split-second decision for use of force. And eventually he orders the female to get back away and she complies, which probably helps you with decision making because he probably thinks, okay, she's probably not an adversary, she's complying with me. And this car comes to a stop, and he is doing a felony car stop. For those of you that don't know what that is, that is you don't approach the car, you stay a distance away from the car, his gun's pointed at the car, and he's ordering the guy to get out of the car. And the suspect uh is not only not getting out of the car, but he starts making all of these moves that simulates, in my opinion, and the deputy's opinion, that he had a firearm. And this goes on for minutes. Uh and I when I evaluated the video, this is all on video, I saw you know 18 plus behaviors that would have given a reasonable officer reason to believe that there's high danger here. I mean, he comes out of the car at one point with his one arm hidden, like he's pointing the weapon with the other. At one point, he's lunching down the car, and the deputy actually verbalized that he he believed that he was loading a weapon or loading a magazine. He's reaching in the back of the car, he's reaching underneath the seat. At some point, he sees an object in the suspect's hands. Now keep in mind, this is an interstate, there's traffic flowing, there's civilians around. Deputy's looking through the back window and he's seeing this, and he actually verbalizes on the radio, I think he has a gun. And this continues until the backing officer arrives. And the backing officer gets out, very similar to the first deputy, felony stop, gun downrange, giving him commands, and the backing officer tells Deputy Gann, he says, I think he has a gun. And that was the confirmation the deputy was looking for. The deputy had a pretty good reason to believe that he had a gun. He didn't take action on that belief. But when the backing officer very definitively said he has a gun, he'd already seen, obviously, the primary officer had already saw an object in his hand, uh, Deputy Gann started firing his weapon, and he fired his weapon until the suspect stops moving. And when the they go up and clear the car, they they don't find a gun, but they find a butcher knife buried into the suspect's chest. So what the suspect was actually doing was stabbing himself with this butcher knife. That was the object in the hand. So when you look at this from uh use of force analysis and law enforcement in Graham B. Connor, of course, Gramby Connor is a signature use of force case that dictates use of force. It talks about reasonableness, it talks about what you know at the time, it talks about giving deference to having to make split-second decisions. And when you look at it from those standpoint, yeah, it's tragic. The guy didn't have a gun. He was, it looked like he was trying to kill himself, actually. Um, but it's uh it's gonna be a legal justified shooting to anybody that sort of has knowledge in this area. The sheriff there, um that was the sheriff of that agency, agreed and found it in policy. And the next thing you know, this was shipped off to another county uh to rule. Instead of the DA there in that county just saying, Yeah, I I went to law school. I took that hour in class on use of force for law enforcement. They actually don't spend very long on it. Um, and the sheriff said it's in policy, and maybe they've consulted with a few experts, which by the way, DAs do all the time. They'll concert with use of force experts and say, tell me about this case. It's obviously not criminal. Um, that's not what the DA did. The DA shipped it to another county for them to decide. And that DA didn't make a decision. That DA sent the case to the grand jury. Now we see this a lot in jurisdictions around the country. I think it's a weak, cowardly move uh because it's it's it's taking the decision-making process off the elected official that got elected to make these decisions. You see this abused a lot. Austin, Texas, is one place where that DA has abused us a lot. We've seen a lot of officers prosecuted in Austin because he sends every case to a grand jury. Well, why would a DA do that instead of just making a decision? Well, I'm not going to tell you why this was done in any place, especially uh in Seward County, but I would tell you, in my opinion, the grand jury process is not uh something that anybody wants to go through from a defendant standpoint. Because in a grand jury process, there's a reason why uh Sol Waxler, the former chief judge of Newark Court of Appeals, he he said it. He says the grand jury can, quote, indict a ham sandwich, end quote. Why did Sol say that? He said that because of the grand jury process. It's not a full adversarial case. The defense cannot present a full defense. The prosecutor can sort of present whatever evidence they think can set a narrative a certain way. And the grand jury doesn't really have two sides of the story, so to speak. Now, I'm not saying every DA does it this way, but it's obviously easy in a grand jury setting to indict a ham sandwich. And Deputy Gann was unfortunately the ham sandwich, and he was indicted by the grand jury. This is why I got the call. And the lawyer tells his story to me and said he was looking for a use of force expert. Now, I do a fair bit of expert work case in a lot of different areas, but when it comes to a criminal case use of force, I thought to myself, Matt, I probably ought to, you know, I could, I certainly could do this, but I know some of the best in the business. I know Jamie Borden and Von Klein. A lot of people that are listening to this podcast are really, really good at this stuff. They do this each and every day. I said, let me let me hook you up with these guys. And the attorney says, Well, I have a use of force expert. I have Jeff Martin out of California, and Jeff's a really good expert, really good, high-end use of force expert. I said, Well, why do you need me? He goes, Well, you teach this course on pre-attack indicators and and behavior cues that occur before violence, and this case is going to lean on that because of all of the behaviors the suspect did. And he's right, I for 10, 15 years, I've been really soaked in this world of pre-incident indicators and what occurs before violence. And we're working on some research validated training right now called Focus, Build Observable Cues for Unknown Situations that brings research into this, and we're really diving deep into this for the very reason for what this case is about. DAs don't understand behavior, police chiefs don't understand behavior, juries don't understand this type of behavior, and we need to bring a high-level approach to this. And and we actually, I've actually taught the class already. We rubbed the class out, websites are going up now. That's not what this that's not what this podcast is about. The point is, that's why I was brought into the case. And we go to work on the case. Uh, Anthony had an excellent team. I feel very confident in Jeff Martin. I feel confident what I can bring to that to the team as well. The attorney was very, very good. And quite frankly, the attorney the entire time was just going, I'm not, I don't even understand how we got here. Like, this is not even close. And he's correct. In fact, there were some weird things going on. I'll give you an example. They brought the charges against Deputy Gann under a statute in Nebraska called sudden quarrel. And what a sudden quarrel is, is considered a provocation that would cause a reasonable person to lose self-control and kill someone in the heat of passion. Let me explain to you how ridiculous that charge is. This isn't a bar fight. This isn't a domestic violence crime, heat of passion. This is a law enforcement officer operating under the color of law. They don't have the options a citizen has. A citizen that saw that type of behavior could walk away, could leave, could call 911. That's not the options that Deputy Gann had. But why would they bring that charge forward? Right? And avoid the fact that he was acting as a police officer. Well, when you act under a police officer, you obviously have to discuss everything that myself and Jeff will talk about human factors and stress and training and policy. And of course, we know all that was on the side of Deputy Gantt. And once again, I'm not going to get in the mind of this DA. Because what these cowards like to do is to sue and to quiet and things like that. And he has full immunity, by the way. You can't sue DAs, you can't sue judges. So they get the opportunity to make these kind of decisions that affect the lives of people forever. Because Deputy Gann will his life will never be the same going through this. Followed policy, followed training, and finds himself indicted under a sudden choral statute. Kind of weird. In fact, if I was a conspiracy theorist, I may say they're trying to stack the deck against him. I don't know what they were trying to do, but here we are. And so I get deposed in this case. And oddly they don't depose Jeff Martin. I don't understand that. But what a deposition is, is before the case is the DA is they want to know what you're going to say at trial. So they they sort of get inside baseball. So and then they also, if you don't say the deposition, would you say something different at the trial, they'll say, oh, you're not, you didn't say that deposition, and you changed your mind. They'll try to confuse the jury. And so this was sort of a big deal for me because I knew it was important because Deputy Gann's facing 20 years in prison. And I prepared immensely for this deposition. And I went into this deposition, and I was pretty shocked how this deposition went. In fact, very little was even asked of me about the behavior of the suspect. That seems to matter to me. Deputy Gann made a split-second decision to use deadly force based on the behavior he was observing. I was an expert in that behavior, and they didn't ask very much at all about that. They also seemed very confused about case law around deadly force and law enforcement, specifically Graham B. Connor and some other cases. So it was kind of an odd one. Now, you know, they always try to play tricks, you know, and depositions, you know, sort of lawyer tricks, you know, they'll maybe say some things and get you to answer things. And I pushed back a little bit. I wasn't rude at all. I thought it was very professional for both him and me. I thought he was, for the most part, professional. I believe I was for the most part professional. But there was some push and tug. That's just a proceeding, that's what occurs. And obviously we have the transcripts to show that. And so we're moving towards the trial. And the trial starting on a Monday, and on Friday afternoon. Now, let me back up. Between the deposition and the trial date, the prosecutor submitted a brief to the judge to remove the experts from the case, to remove policy from the case, to remove any of the training from the case that can't be discussed at trial. Now that's a typical maneuver that's done, and quite frankly, it rarely ever works because most judges would go, well, that seems a little unfair. Here's a police officer that's operating under policy, operating under his training. He's brought experts in to help explain what that means to the jury to help them understand. So, yes, that needs to be part of the trial. But so I didn't take it too seriously. But Friday afternoon before the Monday trial, the judge made the decision that I couldn't testify, Jeff Martin couldn't testify, policy couldn't be mentioned, and training couldn't be mentioned. They said things like in this, the this things like Jeff and I had over inflated our resume. Well, if anything, we didn't put enough in the resume. Said things that we would just confuse the jury. They said the jury could just watch the video and decide themselves. Really? Research says that about half of the general public will watch videos and not understand what legal or illegal or justified or unjustified use of force is. We know that. By the way, DA likely knew that as well. So who's trying to sow confusion? Is it me or is it a judge and a prosecutor not trying to give a jury as much information as possible to make a decision? I'll let you be the judge of that. And so obviously, my opinion is they were trying to stack the deck against Deputy Gann. They didn't want Deputy Gann to put on the defense that he had planned to put on the entire time. Remember, this was two days before the trial was to start, and his entire defense got ripped away from it. Now, in Nebraska, the only way by law you can ban experts in a trial is if you can prove that their testimony would not be relevant or they would not be able to assist the jury in understanding evidence. Now you could badmouth me all you want and say Travis is just a buffoon and he would confuse them, but to say Jeff Martin could not assist and he's not relevant, the guy's a forensic video expert, one of the best in the country. And the main evidence in this was video. But the court's quote from their ruling was the jury can just view the video for themselves and draw their own conclusions. Yeah, no need to have any expertise whatsoever to help the jury with a rapidly evolving law enforcement decision. After all, this is just a sudden quarrel, a crime of passion. You understand where I'm going with this. And the reason I'm discussing this with you is this is not just happening in Omaha, Nebraska. This is happening across the country. And no one's talking about it. Yeah, you've got Von Klaim, and you've got some, you know, and you've got some really good people out there talking about it, but where are the police organizations? Where's these leadership gurus you see all over your social media feeds, right? Posting their latest John Maxwell quotes. No one is talking about this. I mean, where's the unions? The national unions, the national organizations. It's sickening to me that we have a profession that's having to endure this. Can you imagine being a police officer in Seward County, Nebraska, and this decision was made? I mean, can you imagine that? And what this does is a chilling effect, right? Officers will hesitate. They will place themselves in more danger. They will get hurt. They will die across this country if they're scared that they're going to be prosecuted for following rule policies and procedures. And you can't separate the two. You can't separate policies and training. It's not like in the police academy, we sat here and say, here's your policy, here's your training. Now let's talk about the sudden quarrel statutes. No, that doesn't occur. That's ridiculous. What's this is this is so rampant in law enforcement training, every cop listening is going to know what I'm about to say. You're told this at nausea in your training. Follow policy, follow training, and everything else will be okay. Follow policy and follow training, everything else will be okay. That's a lie, ladies and gentlemen. It's not just Deputy Gand to follow policy and training that found himself facing 20 years in prison. It's officers across this country and officers I could name right now sitting in prison. This is going on, and no one's talking about it. No one's fighting back against it. Well, not no one, but the people you think should be aren't. And I don't, I'm not pleased that I'm sitting here talking about it. I got other things I need to be talking about. Where are the leaders? It's sickening to me. And I wanted to sort of bring the story verbally to you. I know I wrote the article, but there's some more details that verbally I can say, right? So what happened here? Well, I was obviously concerned. And to tell you, to frankly, to tell you, my wife and I were praying fervently. I'm not even I'm I was not only praying for Deputy Gann to be completely acquitted and found not guilty and innocent. I may have prayered some things against the people that made his decision that I shouldn't have prayed. Because I do believe they knew full well what they were doing. I'm not stating that as a fact, you notice my words here, right? But I believe they knew full well what they were doing. It's what any reasonable person would believe they were doing. If you got if you found out that an officer was found to be in policy by their leadership, and then they were brought on charges on sudden quarreling, and all of their defense was thrown out by the judge right before the trial. You'd be a complete moron to not know what's going on here. So what happened? The trial goes on. Um the the attorney was actually working towards the appeal because I'm not sure where his mind was, but he was certainly concerned. So he did put into evidence my report. Uh Jeff Martin did testify shortly, uh, just so in case the appeal had to happen. I mean, there were so many grounds of appeal if if this thing came back a conviction. And by the way, and I think any DA would know that, right? You could read the judge's order and go, what is this about? An appellate court is going to rule. But that's not what it's about. Ladies and gentlemen, it's about ruining cops' lives. They don't care that it gets, in my opinion, they don't care that it gets appealed and they lose at the end. That's what happened in New Mexico with that case. Oh, let's just let's just get our conviction. Let's say we did it, and then we can blame the appeals court later. Trial lasted a week, Monday through Friday. And on Friday afternoon, the jury went out, and two hours later, they acquitted Deputy Anthony Gann. In two hours, they acquitted him. They saw right through it. Thank goodness we got leaders that sit on a jury. Thank goodness the civilians on a jury that should know the least about this made the right decision. But that's not guaranteed for every officer out there. Some were waiting in the hallway for Anthony. They hugged him. They apologized for what he had to go through. The civilian jurors understood and got it. And it shows you that even though all the games were played, there was some goodness out there and some truth prevailed. Anthony is obviously going to have to rebuild his life. Yeah, he he came out on the other side, but do I have to tell you what it costs to defend yourself in a murder charge? Do you think this 20-something-year-old deputy had those funds? Do you think his family had those funds? He didn't have you don't you don't get a free defense, folks. We're not scumbag criminals here. We don't get the the the free defense and the go fund me accounts to help us. He didn't have legal defense. But one thing is for sure his life will never be the same, and it certainly won't be what he thought it would be. I think of that idealistic young officer that I once was, and you you think to the years ahead, and you think the way your life will be or would be, that's gone. This story is really just a stark reminder of what lies behind some of the fancy titles in our profession. Those that hide behind politics, those that hide behind a robe, those that hide behind law and order. It shows you what some of them are about. It's easy to talk about leadership with fancy memes and talking points from somebody else. This is where it needs to be, folks. And I'm not seeing it enough. And you aren't seeing it enough because they're cowards too. Well, I'm training and I'm teaching, and I work for this, or I work for that, and I don't want to upset people, so I won't speak about the power within the system that's doing this. Weak, cowardly. I'll never be on the road 200 days a year teaching. Why? Because I'm talking about this, but this is what matters. I'm in, God has put me on this earth to move the needle, to make a difference, to make a change, to actually do good in this world. You think I'm gonna keep posting John Maxwell memes and just tell war stories, make people feel good about themselves? How are you gonna change anything to do that? I need everybody to wake up here that thinks that there are these leadership guru teachers, leaders, this and that, and go, let's really speak about what's going on in law enforcement leadership. And some of the biggest names you can think of will run scared from this. Shame on them. Deputy Gann lost his profession because of cowards. But if we want to save it, we better all wake up and demand courage from more people than civilian jurors. Thanks for listening. Today was a heavy one. Come back. God bless. God bless Deputy Gann. God bless the people that made the right decision. God bless that sheriff. God bless you. Remember, lead on. Stay courageous.

Announcement 25:22

Thank you for listening to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates. We invite you to join other courageous leaders at TravisYates.org.