I have been deeply disturbed, as many have, by the killing of the unarmed and innocent Brazilian man by London police in a subway station, which occurred last Friday. To most reasonable people, the circumstances leading up to the shooting would appear to justify it, and I indicated in my post yesterday that the potential for error in a case like this must be balanced against the need for the most stringent security procedures in the aftermath of the events of the past two and half weeks in London.

Jean Charles de Menezes apparently emerged from a house that the police had under observation, was followed by them to a subway station, and when they ordered him to stop, he instead fled them, was chased down and shot numerous times in the head. He was also wearing a coat which appeared to be padded underneath. This is almost exactly how a person carrying explosives underneath a coat would look. He seemed to look like a suicide bomber, and he was running from the police. The chances that he was an innocent person, possibly misunderstanding the police or fearing them for some unknown reason, would appear to most reasonable people to be highly remote.

All of this took place in the context of a devastating attack two weeks earlier, and an attempted attack just a day earlier, with suspects from the latter attack still on the loose and potentially able to mount further attacks. A "perfect storm" for this type of tragedy, based on Mr. Menezes's behavior and that of the appropriately hypervigilant London police, was thus formed.

However, the fact that they shot Menezes in the head is quite disturbing. Why not shoot him in the legs to disable him? If they thought he might still remain conscious enough to pull the trigger on an attached explosive, why not shoot him five times in the legs, instead of once, to cause him such pain that he would lose all consciousness? Aren't the legs an easier target to hit than the head? Isn't the head just as close, or closer, to the potential explosive device as the legs, and therefore if they aim at the head, isn't it more likely that they might potentially detonate an explosive attached to the upper waist and chest, than if they had shot at the legs?

Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst, Judge Andrew Napolitano, a man that I greatly admire, voiced similar concerns lastnight in an interview with Bill O'Reilly. Judge Napolitano believes that the police were completely wrong, which I do not agree with. But he also believes that they might have shot Mr. Menezes in another area, rather than blowing his head off. I'm afraid that I cannot disagree with that.

Here is the conversation between Judge Napolitano and O'Reilly:

O'Reilly: "I think you're the only one who believes this [that the London police were wrong]. I was reading all the press today, even the nutty mayor of London - the communist over there - even he says, you gotta, if the cops tell you to stop, and they suspect you're a bomber, they're going to shoot to kill."

Napolitano: "You know, they came within three to four feet of him, and they plugged eight bullets in him. And they were wrong. He was harmless. There needs to be more standards before the police can engage in this kind of killing."

O'Reilly: "This is theoretical on your part. Say you and I are on the terror squad, and we're chasing this guy. First we tell him to stop. He doesn't stop. He's wearing a winter coat in the middle of July, okay? We've already staked out a place that we felt might have been a way station for terrorists, and he comes out of the place. So we've got three, three on him. He doesn't stop, he jumps the barrier. Now this is all eyewitness testimony. This isn't the cops. This is stuff that was told to the press."

Napolitano: "I accept the eyewitness testimony as you've characterized it."

O'Reilly: "Okay, so you and I are chasing this guy, right? Now he could have, he could be wired as a suicide bomber with a big coat. You're telling me that we're not going to shoot the guy?"

Napolitano: "I didn't say you couldn't shoot him. In England and America, the law is shoot to stop, shoot to maim, shoot to protect yourself, but not low his brains out, as these police did."

O'Reilly: "Where would you shoot?"

Napolitano: "Listen, I'm not an expert in guns. I would have shot them in his knees, or his arms, or some other part of his body to stop him."

O'Reilly: "If you aim above the waist, alright, you might hit the bomb, and everybody dies."

Napolitano: "The British police were aiming for his head. They put bullets into his head and his torso. He was as innocent as you and I. We don't kill innocent people to protect other innocent people."

O'Reilly: "We don't kill them on purpose. But this guy, I believe brought this upon himself... look, you don't run away from police a day after a bombing, and a week after fifty people are dead, and vault over into a subway thing and think bad things aren't going to happen."

Napolitano: "And in a civilized Western world that believes in the rule of law, and not the rule of men, you don't expect the police are going to kill you because you ran away from them."

O'Reilly: "I'll see that he didn't expect it, but I'll see that these kinds of situations in a war on terror, are going to happen."

Napolitano: "Will you see that the police need to have more reasonable standards before they open fire? More than just a heavy coat in the wintertime?"

O'Reilly: "You can't do that until the investigation comes back. But I'll tell you what: If I thought that this guy was a suicide bomber, he fled from me, was down in the tube, in the subway, I would have killed him."

Napolitano: "The American public, all Western public, will accept more security and this type of police behavior, if they think they're afraid. They'll get rid of their liberty, in deference for their security. That's just history. But what happens when the crisis is over? Do the police still have these powers?"

O'Reilly: "The anti-terror policy adopted from Israel is, if you think you have a suicide bomber, you shoot to kill, you shoot at the head. You know that policy, and I know the policy."

Napolitano: "There isn't a state in the union here that allows that."

O'Reilly: "This is the United States, it's not Britain. And our anti-terror policies are going to change..."

Napolitano: "They probably will change because the public wants it. But the public will pay a dear price, and so will innocent people."

It would be hard to envision that a single state in this union of ours would create a law that would explicitly allow police to shoot in the head a suspect who was fleeing from them. A shot to the head almost guarantees a person's death, and when it has not been positively and unequivocally established that such a person is a lethal threat, it would seem a betrayal of the American ideals of fairness and justice that such a person be summarily executed on the spot.

If the United States is ever forced to change its procedures, such that a person is allowed to be shot in the head and guaranteed death, only because of suspicion that such a person is a suicide bomber, it will indeed be a sad day for this country.