COWARDICE                        

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Cowardice is a trait wherein fear and excessive self-concern overrides doing or saying what is right, good, and of help to others or oneself and in a time of need—it is the opposite of courage. As a label, "cowardice" indicates a failure of character in the face of a challenge. One who succumbs to cowardice is known as a coward. Many military codes of justice proscribe cowardice in that is a crime punishable by death. During the First World War, being a coward in the face of the enemy  was punishable by being shot by a firing squad. Many soldiers in that War were shot for cowardice.

In the Second World War, the only American soldier that was shot for cowardice was the shooting of a soldier named Edward Donald Slovik (born February 18, 1920  and who died on  January 31, 1945) was a United States Army soldier during the Second World War. He was the only American soldier to be executed for desertion since the American Civil War. Although over 21,000 American soldiers were given varying sentences for desertion during World War II, including forty-nine death sentences, Slovik's death sentence was the only one that was carried out.

Cowardice is the “misbehavior motivated by fear,” according to Article 99 of the American Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs military conduct in the presence of the enemy. The article notes that fear is natural when going into battle when it specifies that any member of the armed forces who becomes frightened and refuses to obey orders or abandons his duty when foes lurk nearby can face death or other punishments.

It is a natural trait in all of us to be frightened if we are seriously at risk of being killed or alternatively, seriously injured.   

In the year, 1975 when I was age 42, I climbed partway up that deadly Swiss mountain—the Matterhorn in which as many as over five hundred climbers fell to their death. When I reached a part of the mountain in which I believed that I might fall to my death if I tried to go further, I decided to go no further. Was I a coward in making that decision? No,   I will tell you why.                                                        

The word coward’ applies only to people who have a legal obligation to perform an act that might have some semblance of the risk of being seriously injured or killed.  This is pertinent in professions such as the military, police officers, firemen paramedics and lifeguards and no doubt others also.

People in these professions and even in the military are expected to use common sense when facing dangerous situations. I will give you examples.

A police officer is shot and lying on the road. Another officer runs to his fallen officer and is shot dead before he reached his goal. Is a third officer expected to run towards the two fallen officers? No he certainly isn’t. Is he a coward? No he isn’t. 

A fireman is told to enter a burning house, to rescue a child on the top floor. Flames are coming out of the doorways and the broken windows.  The house is totally engulfed in flames so he refuses to obey the order. Is he a coward? No he isn’t. Him going into the burning house would result in his needless death.

  An ambulance paramedic arrives on the scene of an active shooting event. He sees a victim writhing on the sidewalk. The shooter is shooting everyone he can see. Is he a coward for not running towards the victim on the sidewalk? Of course not. He probably wouldn’t even reach the victim alive.

A life guard sees a woman in the stages of drowning and at the same time he sees a shark approaching the woman. He decides not to jump into the water out of his fear that he may be killed by the shark. Is he a coward? Definitely not. Now if the woman was only twenty feet from the shore and the shark is a hundred feet from the shore, he wouldn’t be in any risk if he ran into the water to pull the woman out of the water. If he didn’t at least try to pull her out of the water under those circumstances, he would be a coward.

In the previous professions mentioned, these people are hired to do their jobs however  they are not expected to commit suicide by doing something that is really stupid and which will surely get them killed.

In 2005, my wife and I were swimming at a beach on the island of Bali, Indonesia. We were invited to do paragliding by having a motor boat pulling us up into the air. My wife accepted the offer. I didn’t. Was I a coward?  She only weighed 125 pounds whereas in that year, I weighed as much as 315 pounds. My fear was that before the boat throttled up at full speed, I would be dragged along the water instead of being lifted up as soon as my feet left the beach. Incidentally, now I only weigh 195 pounds. If I weighed only that weight that year, I would have accepted the offer. 

And now I will tell you about a real coward. He was a sheriff’s deputy working as a security guard who was given the assignment to protect the students against any gunmen that might show up in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. His name is Scot Peterson.

As fate would have it, on February 14^th,, 2018. a 19-year-old   gunman—Nikolas Cruz who was a former student who had been  expelled from the school, showed up at the school and opened fire on students with a semi-automatic rifle, murdering 17 of them.

The previously mentioned sheriff's deputy who was blamed for failing to enter the Florida high school while 17 people were being  killed said that he's been unfairly labeled a coward since (according to him) he did nothing wrong. Let’s see what he did and what he should have done. 

When he heard the shots being fired inside the school while he was outside on the school grounds, instead of confronting the killer inside the school, he stayed outside the school and fled to a safe position.

Keep in mind that he was hired to protect the students and by refusing to enter the high school to protect as many students that he could, he unquestionably was and still is a coward. However, he was not required by law to put his life in danger of being extinguished.

 In order to reduce facing the stigma of being a coward, he claimed that he remained outside of the school to direct the oncoming sheriff’s deputies into the school.  That explanation has about as much support to validate his explanation as a wet noodle.

He claimed afterwards that he did not know which direction the gunfire was coming from, but authorities later released footage of him waiting outside the school during the six-minute shooting spree taking place inside the school. Keep in mind that he originally claimed that the sounds of shots being fired were coming from outside the school. f If that was so, then why didn’t he take protection in the school?

One student, Arman Borghei, told investigators that he looked out of a third-floor  window during the attack and saw Mr. Peterson standing “with his gun drawn and not really doing anything.”

An investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said he “did absolutely nothing” to prevent the killings, and police commissioner Rick Swearingen said: “There can be no excuse for his complete inaction and no question his inaction cost lives.” 

Peterson was subsequently arrested on June 5^th and faces seven charges of neglect of a child, three counts of culpable negligence and one count of perjury which all told could carry a maximum prison sentence of nearly 100 years if the sentences are to be served consecutively. Needless to say, he was fired.

This coward could have saved some of the 17 students that the shooter had killed if he had the intestinal fortitude to enter the school instead of keeping safe outside.

Peterson’s lawyer, Joseph DiRuzzo, said that Peterson denies the “spurious charges” and added: “He cannot reasonably be prosecuted because he was not a ‘caregiver’, that is defined as ‘a parent’. Caretakers are not just parents. When parents send their children to school, the teachers then become the caretakers of the children. Since the coward was employed by the school to protect the students, he too was a caretaker. 

Scott Peterson, thr0ugh his attorney, filed a motion to have the wrongful death suit against him filed by Andrew Pollack ( father of his daughter  Marjory) a Stoneman Douglas High school shooting victim dismissed. Peterson's attorney argued his client had no specific legal obligation to provide protection and therefore the suit must be rejected.

The judge hearing the motion denied it, and Pollack and his attorney had very strong and well deserved in my opinion, criticisms of Peterson's willful refusal to act, openly calling him a coward, and rightly so.

Notwithstanding that decision of the judge, I think his decision was legally wrong. There is a distinct difference between a moral obligation and a legal one. And unfortunately, legally speaking, Pollack's lawsuit against Peterson is highly unlikely to prevail.

There is long-standing and well established legal precedent from both the Federal Courts as well as the Supreme Court of the United States that makes it crystal clear that the Police/Government has NO specific duty to protect individual citizens or groups of Citizens and CANNOT be sued or held liable for failing to have done so.

Justice Warren in the Supreme Court of the United States said in part; “The duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, (but without)  a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists.”

Sadly, based on a review of the overwhelming majority of comments from the general public on various social media and internet news sites, a great many many people have found this to be a truly shocking revelation that they were completely unaware of.

I would be astounded if in the contract between Peterson and the Sheriff’s Department and the school, there was nothing stated in the agreement that Peterson was to protect the students at that particular school. If the agreement stated that the students and staff were to be protected by Peterson, then the judge who dismissed Peterson’s lawyer’s petition to dismiss the claim was correct.

If there is any measure of “good” that could be derived from such an unspeakable horror, is that more and more people are waking up to the reality that  not only can the Police NOT be everywhere at once and in fact very rarely actually stop a crime in progress, but that they have no actual duty to protect or defend individual citizens from predators or the mentally ill. Reawakening people to the idea that they are their own first responders and ultimately the ones responsible for their and their loved ones safety and self defense.

The following scenario comes to mind. If Peterson ran into the school to confront the shooter and the shooter aimed his gun at him, Peterson would legally have the right to shoot the gunman and if the gunman was killed or seriously wounded, then the students still alive would be saved. That is what he should have done but chose not to do it because he was a coward.

What is the point of hiring a security guard to protect the students from gunmen if the security guard has no obligation to protect the students. 

Many years ago when I was working in a security firm, we were hired to protect several million dollars of rare coins that was in a bank and had to be transferred to a location where they would be shown to the public. We were armed. I was armed with a silver-plated double barreled shotgun.  Now if someone tried to steal the one-million-dollar coin that was displayed in a class showcase right next to me, I couldn’t shoot the robber. If however, he aimed a gun at me, his head would have disappeared from the blast of the shotgun.

At another time, I was sent to a home to protect a witness who was to testify against a gangster the next morning. If another gangster entered the home to kill the witness, I could shoot the gangster because I was authorized to protect the witness and take whatever steps required to protect the witness. Of course, these two events  happened in Canada.

It is a natural trait in all of us to be frightened if we are seriously at risk of being killed or alternatively, seriously injured.   

In the year, 1975 when I was age 42.  I climbed partway up that deadly Swiss mountain—the Matterhorn in which as many as over five hundred climbers fell to their death while climbing that very steep mountain.  When I reached a part of the mountain in which I believed that I might fall to my death if I tried to go further, I decided to go no further. Was I a coward in making that decision? No,   I will tell you why.                                                       

The word coward’ applies only to people who have a legal obligation to perform an act that might have some semblance of the risk of being seriously injured or killed.  This is pertinent in professions such as the military, police officers, firemen paramedics and lifeguards and no doubt others also.

People in these professions and even in the military are expected to use common sense when facing dangerous situations. I will give you examples.

A police officer is shot and lying on the road. Another officer runs to his fallen officer and is shot dead before he reached his goal. Is a third officer expected to run towards the two fallen officers? No he certainly isn’t. Is he a coward? No he isn’t. 

A fireman is told to enter a burning house, to rescue a child on the top floor. Flames are coming out of the doorways and the broken windows.  The house is totally engulfed in flames so he refuses to obey the order. Is he a coward? No he isn’t. Him going into the burning house would result in his needless death.

 An ambulance paramedic arrives on the scene of an active shooting event He sees a victim writhing on the sidewalk. The shooter is shooting everyone he can see. Is he a coward for not running towards the victim on the sidewalk? Of course not.  He probably wouldn’t even reach the victim alive.

A life guard sees a woman in the stages of drowning and at the same time he sees a shark approaching the woman. He decides not to jump into the water out of fear that he may be killed by the shark. Is he a coward? Definitely not. Now if the woman was only twenty feet from the shore and the shark is a hundred feet from the shore, he wouldn’t be in any risk if he ran into the water to pull the woman out of the water. If he didn’t at least try to pull her out of the water under those circumstances, he would be a coward.

In the previous professions mentioned, these people are hired to do their jobs however  they are not expected to commit suicide by doing something that is really stupid that will surely get them killed.

In 2005, my wife and I were swimming at a beach on the island of Bali, Indonesia. We were invited to do paragliding by having a motor boat pulling us up into the air. My wife accepted the offer. I didn’t. Was I a coward?  She only weighed 125 pounds whereas in that year, I weighed as much as 315 pounds. My fear was that before the boat throttled up at full speed, I would be dragged along the beach face down instead of being lifted up as soon as I left the beach. Incidentally, now I only weigh 195 pounds. If I weighed only that weight that year, I would have accepted the offer. 

And now I will tell you about a real coward. He was a Sheriff’s deputy working as a security guard who was given the assignment to protect the students against any gunmen that might show up in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

As fate would have it, on February 14^th,, 2018. a 19-year-old   gunman—Nikolas Cruz ( a former student who was expelled from the school) showed up at the school and opened fire on students with a semi-automatic rifle, murdering 17 of them.

The previously mentioned sheriff's deputy blamed for failing to enter the Florida high school while 17 people were being  killed said that he's been unfairly labeled a coward since (according to him) he did nothing wrong. Let’s see what he did and what he should have done.  

When he heard the shots being fired inside the school, instead of confronting the killer inside the school, he stayed outside the school and fled to a safe position.

Keep in mind that he had no duty to protect the students and by refusing to enter the high school to protect as many students that he could, he unquestionably was and still is a coward.

 In order to reduce his cowardice, he claimed that he remained outside to direct the oncoming sheriff’s deputies into the school.  That explanation is about as weak as a wet noodle.

He claimed afterwards that he did not know which direction the gunfire was coming from, but authorities later released footage of him waiting outside the school during the six-minute shooting spree taking place inside the school. keep in mind that he originally claimed that it was coming from outside the school.

One student, Arman Borghei, told investigators that he looked out of a third-floor  window during the attack and saw Mr. Peterson standing “with his gun drawn and not really doing anything.”

An investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said he “did absolutely nothing” to prevent the killings, and police commissioner Rick Swearingen said: “There can be no excuse for his complete inaction and no question his inaction cost lives.” 

Peterson was subsequently arrested June 5^th and faces seven charges of neglect of a child, three counts of culpable negligence and one count of perjury which all told could carry a maximum prison  sentence of nearly 100 years.

This coward could have saves some of the 17 students that the shooter had killed if he had the intestinal fortitude to enter the school instead of keeping safe outside.

Needless to say, he was fired

Peterson’s lawyer, Joseph DiRuzzo, said he denies the “spurious charges” and added: “He cannot reasonably be prosecuted because he was not a ‘caregiver’, which is defined as ‘a parent.

Caretakers are not just parents. When parents send their children to school, the teachers then become the caretakers of the children. Since the coward was employed by the school to protect the students, he too was a caretaker.  

This coward’s trial is going to be a real interesting one.  When I learn the results of that trial, I will write another article on that particular case.