After Jason Servo’s trainwreck of a testimony that could have been avoided had Jason Short used an expert witness who had actually trained me, the judge allowed deputy DA’s Todd Jackson and Kate Molina to present a rebuttal witness.
This was partially due to the line of questioning by Chris Trotter with Servo, where Trotter had asked Servo if my actions were reasonable given the circumstances. Apparently this is asking a witness to reach a legal conclusion, which Jackson and Molina were able to use as “new evidence” to justify their ambush witness.
This was all of a sudden where Jason Short and Christopher Trotter decided to finally mount a challenge to the DA’s. They argued that this person should not be allowed to testify because the state already put on their case and rested, and this expert witness was not previously listed on the state’s witness list nor did he testify at the grand jury.
The judge allowed it anyway.
We didn’t even know who this person was going to be until around midnight. Jason Short and Chris Trotter then left it up to me to stay up all night to try to find out what I could about this witness.
This new surprise witness turned out to be Gresham police department’s firearms and use of force instructor, Ryan Rasmussen.
As Rasmussen was testifying about his experiences and training, one thing came to light: His entire testimony was not relevant to me or my situation because Rasmussen does not have a CHL, is not certified to train citizens on CHL’s, knows nothing about CHL requirements, and does not know what citizens are trained or not trained on when taking the CHL class. All of his experience was either in the military, as an armed security guard for one year, and as a police officer. He could only testify as to what police are trained on, which was completely irrelevant to me.
But did Jason Short motion to expunge Rasmussen’s testimony based on this? No, of course not. They let the state’s ambush expert witness say everything their client did was wrong, despite having no qualifications to reach those conclusions.
What’s incredibly interesting here is that DA Todd Jackson had previously argued that he was concerned that the expert witness Trotter was going to call was going to use the testimony to apply police training guidelines to my actions. Yet here Jackson is, doing the exact thing that he previously argued against:
(click to enlarge)
You know that part about Short and Trotter saying their expert witness could rebut anything a state’s expert witness could say? Well, that idea completely fell apart because Trotter and Short’s friend was several years out of date on the current use of force standards, and couldn’t actually rebut anything Rasumussen was saying.
Once again, Jason Glenn Short and Christopher Trotter misled their client.
In fact, I would argue that Rasmussen’s own judgement of hostile mobs is flawed, because he allowed himself to be attacked by several individuals on the MAX back in 2012, while he was on duty in uniform.
Rasmussen was also caught lying on the witness stand when he stated that he and his department do not use any sort of continuums or charts in use of force situations. We had prior testimony from a different case where Rasmussen speaks of the OODA Loop being used as a reference in his trainings.
Officer Ryan Rasmussen also testified that they no longer go by the 21 foot rule, that they use a reasonable-ness standard. That is completely contrary to what I was personally told by a law enforcement officer the day before the incident, when I was told they’ve expanded the 21 foot rule to a 25 foot rule.
But of course Jason Short didn’t bother bringing this up in court.
Rasmussen would go on to testify that police officers are not trained to draw their firearm on a person, not shoot, then re-holster. He testified that if an officer is drawing their gun, it’s only when firing. This is counter to what I have personally witnessed, as I have seen police draw firearms on a potentially dangerous subject holding a knife, and once the person dropped the knife and they were no longer a threat, the police then re-holstered their firearms and brought the person into custody.
But Jason Short, the wimpiest attorney in Oregon, never attempted to present my personal knowledge and information on this to the courts.
I have also heard from several other officers that they have personally drawn their firearms on potentially dangerous subjects, then once the person ceases to be a threat, these officers have re-holstered their firearms. I even have a Gresham police officer, presumably trained by Ryan Rasmussen, saying he has done this on several occasions over the years.
Sounds a lot like what I did on July 7th, 2016.