Don Lemon and Sunny Hostin duked it out in a heated dust-up over the school arrest in South Carolina this week in which a school police officer was fired for his handling of a teenage girl.
CNN's Lemon argued this week on Wolf Blitzer's "The Situation Room" that he needed to know more about the incident at Spring Valley High School, which was recorded in a cellphone video,
before passing judgment, according to Mediaite.
Multiple video clips show deputy Ben Fields pulling the female student out of her desk and then throwing her across the floor. Administration reportedly contacted the officer after the student refused their attempts to remove her
from the classroom, according to WLTX-TV.
"It does look disturbing," Lemon said to Blitzer. "The part that is most disturbing to me is seeing her thrown around. As far as the desk going over, I don't know if the desk fell over because she didn't want to get up or if he pushed it over . . . I think there's context to everything."
"I would like to see what happens before and I would like to see what happened afterwards . . . It does look horrible. It does look like there’s no excuse for what he’s doing to her, but again, we don't know," he continued.
That response set off Hostin, the network's legal analyst.
"The law provides that the standard here is whether or not the officer has to use this type of force," Hostin told Lemon in an exchange that morphed into a shouting match between the two.
"The bottom line is, Don, this is a young girl. This is a girl in school. There is no justification for using that kind of force. Whether or not that force is justifiable is the issue, and the force is not justifiable. She is sitting there, she is not resisting, she is sitting there in a chair. That is unreasonable force, that is excessive force, and it’s assault," she continued.
The on-air verbal joust divided social media as well.
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