From [HERE] On an autumn night last year a 16-year-old high school student, Thai Gurule, was crossing a street in Portland, Oregon, accompanied by his older brother and a few friends. No one was breaking the law, being disruptive, or acting suspiciously. Yet the black teenager would soon be stopped by police officers without probable cause, illegally detained, shoved off his feet onto the ground, punched multiple times in the torso, kneed in the stomach, grabbed by the hair, and Tased.

He would later be charged with assaulting a public safety officer, resisting arrest, and attempted strangulation, per the narrative of the cops who wrote the police report.

Here's how the police saw it, or at least how they claimed to see it after the fact: they approached a group that fit the description of people reported to be creating a disturbance. A 16-year-old started walking away from their attempts to question him. He also talked back. They grabbed him and wanted to cuff him, but he struggled, threw punches, and put one of them in a headlock. So he got Tased.  

In most cases like this the teen would be convicted handily based solely on police testimony, even though the initial stop was found to violate his rights. An innocent cannot raise the illegality of an arrest as a defense against the charge of resisting it. Thus the cases in which people with no intention of breaking any laws wind up with serious criminal records due to their reaction to unjust police aggression.

But thanks in part to bystanders who captured video of this teen's encounter with police, Judge Diana Stuart acquitted him last week. After being illegally stopped, her ruling acknowledged, the youth did tense his arms, struggle to stay on his feet, and flail around with his limbs. But he did so to protect himself from "senseless and aggressive" violence that "a reasonable person would have felt was excessive force," she found, adding that police misrepresented parts of the encounter in their report, which she did not find credible after reviewing the video evidence.