Tag: Ferguson

Darren Wilson’s Side Of The Story

Wilson Injury

From a writeup of last night’s grand jury decision:

Wilson testified that Brown punched him in the head after the door-slam, causing him to fear for his life. The teen took off after the first two shots but then stopped, the officer said. “His right (hand) goes under his shirt in his waistband and he starts running at me,” Wilson told the jury. “I tell, keep telling him to go to the ground. He doesn’t. I shoot a series of shots. I don’t know how many I shot.” Ten shots were fired from outside of the police car. McCulloch added that Wilson suffered “some swelling and redness to his face” — potential evidence that he was punched. Hospital photos shown to the grand jury depicted a minimally injured Wilson with some discoloration on his right cheek and the back of his neck.

Josh Marshall highlights another part of Wilson’s testimony:

Fraught and loaded with meaning, Darren Wilson told the St. Louis County grand jury that during his scuffle with Michael Brown, the 18 year old Brown looked “angry”, like a “demon.” This is a classic case of a statement that people on both sides will see through profoundly different lights. For Wilson’s supporters, it’s Wilson’s confirmation that Brown was a thug, an out of control violent malefactor. For Brown supporters, there’s little more graphic evidence of the dehumanization that lead to Brown’s killing.

Friedersdorf reads through testimony by Wilson and witnesses. His takeaway:

I haven’t yet had time to go through all the documents released by St. Louis County, but based on these witness statements, I can see why the grand jury would have reason to doubt whether Officer Wilson committed a crime. At least some witnesses corroborate his story. Some that don’t contradict one another. If the witnesses above all testified in a criminal trial, it’s hard to imagine that a jury would fail to have reasonable doubts about what really happened. There are hundreds of pages to sift through that the grand jury saw. In coming days, we’ll probably discover at least some eyewitness testimony contradicted by physical evidence. But it seems all but certain that we’ll never know exactly what happened that day.

Paul Campos adds:

Cases like this bring to mind Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, the film that famously features the depiction of a violent incident from the perspectives of four witness-participants. The witnesses all contradict each other on various key points, and the audience is left to ponder how difficult it is to discern what really happened in a world full of biased, confused, and, otherwise unreliable storytellers.

Jonathan Ellis provides more highlights from Wilson’s testimony. All the released evidence can be found here.

Chart Of The Day

162000

Update from a reader:

I’m a lawyer and I studied Epidemiology at Harvard, so I know bad and misleading statistics when I see them. Yes, failures to indict are rare, because under normal circumstances prosecutors only seek indictments when they have strong cases!

This is what we call “selection bias.” If Michael Brown had been white, there would have been no media outcry, and no protests (google “Dillon Taylor,” a white guy shot by police in Utah at the same time Ferguson was going down). Under normal circumstances, a prosecutor would have determined very quickly that Darren Wilson hadn’t done anything wrong, and the case would never have been presented to a grand jury.

In this case, because of outcry (stoked largely by early reporting that seemed to suggest that Wilson had gunned down Brown in cold blood for no reason,) the prosecutor had to take the case to a grand jury to appease the crowd. But the facts never supported an indictment.

We saw this before with Trayvon Martin; a prosecutor tries a fatally weak case under political pressure and inevitably fails. Paradoxically, this makes people more angry, because they don’t understand that these cases would never have been brought in the first place absent outcry.

Even Nate Silver has been passing around the rarity of failures to indict as if that tells us something about the current case. He should know better.

Another reader:

As the website admits, it is a chart of federal indictments, not state indictments. State and county grand juries fail to bring indictments in Missouri at a far higher rate, a quick perusal of Nexis shows.

More feedback “from a former criminal defense attorney”:

I think a lot of folks are missing the multitude of ways this grand jury was handled abnormally. Remember, it isn’t an adversarial proceeding; it is entirely under the control of the prosecutors. In a typical grand jury, the prosecutors do not present evidence that is obviously incorrect, such as the witnesses who said Wilson fired at a running Brown from inside the car. That’s obvious mistaken and therefore not evidence of anything.

Why did they bring out all that garbage before the grand jury? For the same reason that Fox News goes on a tirade over everything Obama, in the hopes that a cumulative impression will be formed that the witnesses were making things up, even as the individual elements of that narrative don’t hold up. And there’s no one in the grand jury room to say “well if you know this guy is wrong, why is he here?” But it was even worse than that. In the transcript, when witnesses testified that rather than running toward Wilson, Brown was actually staggering to the ground, the prosecutor said – in front of the grand jury! – “But that physical evidence contradicts your testimony.” (Which isn’t true – the physical evidence in this case is neutral on this critical point.) In other words, this was not, as McCulloch claimed, a presenting of all evidence, neutrally, to the grand jury. This was out and out advocacy for no indictment.

This is how its supposed to work: If the prosecutor does not believe he can win a conviction, the case ends there and doesn’t go to a grand jury. He exercises prosecutorial discretion. This happens ALL the time. If the prosecutor thinks he has a case, he goes to the grand jury and presents his case. He doesn’t present both sides because this isn’t an adversarial trial that can probe conflicting evidence. The sole question is whether the prosecutor can make his case. If there are witnesses who see a crime contradicted by witnesses who don’t, the trial jury decides after both sides question the witnesses. In the grand jury, the decision is merely whether the prosecutor can proceed. Then the indictment (or, more rarely, no indictment) is released during business hours, even in high profile cases. There are rarely press conferences, but when they occur the prosecutors lay out the charges. They do not advocate their case. They do not whine about social media. They do not speculate farther than the question at hand (In other words, all McCulloch had to say was that the grand jury found no basis for an indictment, yet he went farther and claimed the shooting was justified, an entirely different question.) They do not parade out discredited evidence.

I am open to the possibility that this was not a case that could end in conviction. But we cannot draw any conclusions about the facts from this travesty of a proceeding. It has no credibility. And I’m not even getting to the timing of the announcement – waiting hours and then 20 minutes more as the tension built and built, as if they wanted a riot.

(Chart via Philip Bump)

The Ferguson Decision: Tweet Reax

https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/537073199985729536

https://twitter.com/JonathanBlakely/status/537091695746482177

Ferguson On Edge

Protest Outside Ferguson Police Department

Protesters were arrested last night. And a court decision could drop tomorrow:

The grand jury hearing evidence on the Michael Brown shooting is preparing to meet Friday for what might be its final session, and a decision on whether to charge Officer Darren Wilson could come the same day, law enforcement officials briefed on the plans said.

On Monday, Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard. Jamelle Bouie disapproves of such actions:

[W]hile many Ferguson residents were disturbed by the damage done during the earliest protests, there’s anger over the choice to declare a state of emergency, and rightfully so.

Remember, the initial Ferguson protests—which began the afternoon Brown was killed—weren’t violent. Instead, at first dozens, then hundreds of people gathered to peacefully protest the shooting and demand answers for why Brown’s body was allowed to lie in the sun for four hours before police took action. If there was unrest that day, it was less because of the protesters and more because of police.

As soon as residents met to protest Brown’s death that day, police brought scores of reinforcements. The Ferguson Police Department called in more than 100 officers from other jurisdictions, with some officers wielding dogs and shotguns. Given the circumstances—an angry community that wanted answers over the death of a teenager—it was an overreaction that engendered mistrust and worsened the situation.

Amy Davidson argues along the same lines:

The grand jury may surprise those who expect it to let Officer Wilson walk away. Those who are watching the people of Ferguson with such worry now may be asked to comprehend them in ways they haven’t before. It is treated as somehow exceptional that there were no riots after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, in Florida. But what is often forgotten there is that what Martin’s parents asked for, first and foremost, was simply a trial of some kind, a chance for their son’s story to be heard in open court—at first, it looked as if it never would be. They got that, if not the full measure of accountability they hoped for. The fearfulness of the authorities in Missouri has been seen as an insult to the black community and a preëmptive strike against perfectly legal peaceful protests. Both of those elements are there, and both, counterproductively, increase tensions and reduce trust.

Paul Cassell hopes for transparency from the grand jury:

Several weeks ago, Bob McCulloch (the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney supervising the grand jury) issued a little-discussed news release, promising that if the grand jury decides not to charge, he will then seek to have the grand jury’s information made publicly available: “If the grand jury does not return an indictment, then I will ask the court to order that the evidence be released to the public as soon as possible if not immediately.”  (McCulloch has also pointed out that if the grand jury makes a decision to return charges, no such motion will be required because the facts will naturally emerge during the criminal trial.)

… It is hard to imagine a court turning down McCulloch’s request to release the grand jury information.  This will make the Michael Brown shooting investigation far more “transparent” than just about any other high-profile criminal investigation.

(Photo: A protestor in a Guy Fawkes mask, raises his hands in front of a line of police outside the Ferguson Police Department as part of continued demonstrations in regards to the shooting death of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri on November 19, 2014. By Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

How Did The Ferguson Shooting Really Go Down? Ctd

After new reporting on Michael Brown’s death, Ambinder asks, “did the media get Ferguson wrong?”

Police militarization and an unequal justice system are real problems that deserve sustained scrutiny. These problems are more insidious than a rush to judgment against one particular officer, presumption of innocence be damned. So maybe the best thing to do would be to say, well, in this particular case, it turns out that the police officer might not have acted as wantonly as we thought. But it really doesn’t matter, because the response to the shooting called attention to police abuse and discrimination in a way that resonated across the world. They had tanks! They threatened to killed reporters! The truth here is less important than Truth.

For the news media, though, the “injustice is the story, not Darren Wilson” story won’t wash.

… The journey for racial justice rejects the notion that truth is an effect of power. It is based on the notion that truth transcends power. The media wants to be on the right side of history when it comes to race. Accepting truth wherever we find it, no matter how painful it is to our sensibilities, is even more important when fundamental issues of justice are at stake.

Alex Altman, on the other hand, focuses on what the leaks don’t say:

They don’t explain the origin of the skirmish, which seems to have escalated abruptly. In describing the toxicology report, the Post’s sources say “the levels in Brown’s body may have been high enough to trigger hallucinations,” but there is no scientific link between marijuana and violent behavior.

Most importantly, the leaks do not provide new forensic information about the sequence of fatal shots. “What we want to know is why Officer Wilson shot Michael Brown multiple times and killed him even though he was more than 20 feet away from his patrol car,” Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Brown’s family, said in a statement. “This is the crux of the matter!” The autopsy does not offer any answers.

Bouie makes related points:

[W]e’re stuck with the facts we’ve had since August, none of which gives a conclusive answer to the key question in the case: Who started it? And even if it did—and even if Brown was at fault for the whole encounter—we’re still left with the other important question: Why did Wilson keep firing after Brown moved away?

At this point, any answer is tied tightly to your sympathies. Side with Michael Brown and the Ferguson protesters, and you’re likely to think Wilson overreacted or—at worst—actively abused his power. And if you support Darren Wilson, you’re just as likely to see an honest cop just defending himself from a dangerous aggressor.

How Did The Ferguson Shooting Really Go Down?

Activists March In Ferguson On Nat'l Day Of Action Against Police Brutality

The WaP0 reports on the autopsy of Michael Brown. It “suggests that the 18-year-old may not have had his hands raised when he was fatally shot”:

Experts told the newspaper that Brown was first shot at close range and may have been reaching for Wilson’s weapon while the officer was still in his vehicle and Brown was standing at the driver’s side window. The autopsy found material “consistent with products that are discharged from the barrel of a firearm” in a wound on Brown’s thumb, the autopsy says.

Another key piece of evidence:

Seven or eight African American eyewitnesses have provided testimony consistent with Wilson’s account, but none have spoken publicly out of fear for their safety, The Post’s sources said.

But Trymaine Lee relays some pushback on the WaPo’s reporting. He writes that “one of the experts whose analysis was central to those claims told msnbc that her analysis of the findings had been taken out of context”:

“You cannot interpret autopsy reports in a vacuum. You need to do it in the context of the scene, the investigation and the witness statements,” Dr. Judy Melinek said. “Sometimes when you take things out of context they can be more inflammatory.”

Danny Vinik analyzes the news:

How much stock you put in these results depends, in part, on how much you trust the county medical examiner’s office and the sources who spoke to the Post. The Brown family didn’t trust local authorities at all—that’s why they asked for a private autopsy in the first place. “The family has not believed anything the police or this medical examiner has said,” a lawyer for the family told The Washington Post. “They have their witnesses. We have seven witnesses that we know about that say the opposite.”

In addition, we don’t know much of the evidence that has been presented to the grand jury. These leaks are only part of the story. The Department of Justice, for its part, also condemned the leaks Wednesday, saying, “There seems to be an inappropriate effort to influence public opinion about this case.”

John Cole argues that the “leaks are about one thing, and one thing only- prepping the field for no indictment”:

I think my favorite part was the reefer madness bullshit, in which it was stated he had enough THC in his system to cause hallucinations. Reminded me of the DARE days when cops with straight faces told kids that if they smoked pot they would jump out of windows thinking they could fly.

Jonathan Cohn adds that a “decision to charge Wilson was never that likely, given the broad leeway that Missouri law gives to police who say they are acting in self-defense”:

If these new reports are correct, an indictment is even more improbable. That’s unlikely to sit well with Ferguson residents, whose grievances reflect long-simmering resentment over the treatment of a largely black population by a largely white police force. Brown’s killing instigated protests and, eventually, confrontations with police. But the problems existed long beforehand.

Allahpundit wonders what happens next:

[Benjamin L. Crump, a lawyer for the Brown family] says he has seven witnesses who’ll say that Wilson gunned Brown down unjustifiably. Great, says the defense, we have seven witnesses who say the opposite plus a pile of forensic evidence that shows Brown, who’d just committed a robbery at the local convenience store, not only assaulted a police officer but attempted to seize his firearm. There’s little doubt, barring some bombshell evidence that the public doesn’t know about, that Wilson’s not going to be convicted. The question now is whether he’ll be charged. One theory for all the leaks lately is that law enforcement is trying to prepare the public for the fact that grand jury is unlikely to return an indictment, but I don’t know: Given what Crump said in the excerpt above plus protesters vowing that “it’s going to be a war” if Wilson isn’t charged, sounds like releasing the evidence early isn’t going to calm anyone down. On the contrary, it may be that this is being leaked because Wilson supporters fear that he’ll be unfairly indicted anyway for political reasons, even though there’s no probable cause to think he murdered Brown. That’s probably the outcome city leaders would prefer — indictment followed by acquittal so that they can say the system took the incident seriously enough to force Wilson to defend his actions in open court. Think that result would calm people down? Me neither.

(Photo: Josh Williams walks beside a memorial built on the spot in Ferguson, Missouri where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson. The photo was taken on October 22, 2014. By Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Teaching Ferguson

Protest over death of black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson

Rebecca Schuman explores the ways colleges have brought “living history” into the classroom:

The desire among professors and students to explore the context of the Brown shooting has resulted in an informal nationwide movement, in fact, loosely gathered under the hashtag #FergusonSyllabus (begun by Georgetown professor Marcia Chatelain). Participants from a variety of disciplines have offered articles, books, blog posts, videos, and more to help teachers help their students understand what is happening here.

This “syllabus” is certainly far removed from the esoteric fare your average freshman encounters—sure, The Epic of Gilgamesh and drosophila flies are important, but their immediate relevance to 18-year-olds is often a bit of a stretch. The events of Ferguson—and, more broadly, the workings of the U.S. criminal justice system, and the racial and economic segregation of our cities—are, on the other hand, palpable around them now. To transform the needless death of a young man to a “teachable moment” may feel heartless, but that doesn’t mean our students shouldn’t learn from it. In fact, they’re eager to.

(Photo: Police forces in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, on August 17, 2014. By Bilgin Sasmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)