Marvin Guy, Who Shot a Cop During a No-Knock Raid, Is Found Guilty of Murder
A jury in Texas on Tuesday convicted a man of murdering a local police officer in a case that pitted no-knock raids against the right to self-defense.
Marvin Guy, who waited in jail for over nine years before his trial, was found guilty of murdering Detective Charles Dinwiddie, whom Guy said he mistook for an intruder after a SWAT team in 2014 smashed his bedroom window and tried to break into his home with a battering ham during a 5:45 a.m. drug raid. The panel declined, however, to convict him of capital murder and instead opted for murder, meaning they did not agree—at least not unanimously—that Guy knew he was shooting at law enforcement.
The raid was the product of a no-knock warrant, which police pursued in response to a tip that Guy had been dealing cocaine, and which allowed them to break into Guy’s apartment without first identifying themselves.
On May 9, 2014, before the sun rose, about two dozen officers arrived at Guy’s residence. The team struggled to fully penetrate the door with their battering ram; something was blocking it from behind. One officer accidentally detonated his stun grenade, inflaming what was already a raid going rapidly awry.
Guy, who lived in a high-crime area, said he was woken up and assumed the police were criminals trying to break into his home. He had allegedly been on edge about such a situation: One of his neighbors had reportedly been victimized similarly a week before when an intruder choked her after forcing entry by way of her first-floor window. Guy allegedly hit four officers, killing Dinwiddie and prompting police to fire over 40 rounds in return.
The prosecution, however, theorized that Guy had somehow come to know the police were coming and that he’d set a trap to “ambush” them. “One man’s ambush is another man panicked, being scared his home is being broken into,” countered Jon Evans, Guy’s defense attorney.
Key to the defense’s case were the frenzied circumstances characteristic of many no-knock raids—namely that it was set in motion without warning and before dawn, when t
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