The Taking In Of Ferguson, 2

The series continues.  All this can’t be comprehensive (would probably require a book for that), but should include some salient points.

MICHAEL BROWN (the Deceased)

Brown did not have a great life.  His mother apparently made poor decisions, but both he and his mother had to struggle through a poverty-stricken, almost hopeless environment. 

Brown was, by all appearances, an amateurish, petty thief, with at very most some loose association with a petty “gang.”  He didn’t use, or even apparently possess, a weapon—not even a knife, let alone a gun.  He apparently sometimes used his size, as big people sometimes do, to get what he wanted.  But not a weapon.

He occasionally listened to violent lyric’d rap music, a common activity for a number of young African-American males.  Yet conversely also smoked weed, a mellowing drug.

So while he may not have fit the fold of a “gentle giant,” he wasn’t much of a gang-banger either.

What’s very clear is that Brown’s less than ideal decisions prior to that fateful 2 minutes were not of a magnitude—not even remotely close—to have cost him his life.  We will look closer at those 2 minutes later.

DARRIN WILSON (the Shooter)

Wilson hasn’t had that great a life either.  He had a mother who made poor decisions also.  Multiple divorces, trouble with the law, even criminal forgery.  Then she died when Wilson was 16, leaving him alone with this then step-father. 

Wilson first worked as a cop in the neighboring town of Jennings, which was so racially troubled and had a poorly performing police force, that the force was disbanded.  Wilson then came to Ferguson. 

Other than the culture of Ferguson, and the Ferguson police department that was disconnected from the majority black community, we apparently have no record of racial problems with Wilson.

However, the language he used in describing Brown—demon, grunting, aggressive, Hulk Hogan, etc.—is typical of the type of subtle racism of someone scared of “the other,” in that superhuman characteristics are imparted to that adversary, an adversary deemed so powerful that even though wounded he was going to supposedly charge and tear Wilson apart.  So he had to be shot to be stopped.

It is true Brown was big, about 6’5” and almost 300 pounds.  But Wilson is no small officer; he’s 6’4” and 210 pounds, and presumably with a lot of training about how to use that to even better effect.  Of course, Wilson probably wasn’t used to running into too many people who outsized and outweighed him.

For his EVENTUAL questioning (readers can note for themselves when his statements were taken), Wilson seemed well rehearsed.  For his media interview, Wilson appeared to be the product of months of interview coaching and media preparation.  His story seems, even if he believes it, carefully polished.

BOB MCCULLOCH (the Prosecutor)

McCulloch has or had relatives on the police force, including his father—an officer who was killed in the line of duty when he was shot by a black man.

  

Bob McCulloch had no intention of bringing the case to trial.  He should have recused himself from the case for multiple reasons: a record the black community considered one of selective and potentially discriminatory prosecution and non-prosecution; his working relationship with the officer;  the fact that McCulloch’s father was killed by an African-American male criminal, etc.  Yet so arrogant was he that he actually dared the governor to remove him (one presumes, in the incestuous nature of Missouri politics, that he has something he can hang over the governor’s head).

If he truly had nothing to hide, and wanted to steer nothing, he would have agreed to a special (independent) prosecutor from outside the jurisdiction.  He didn’t.  He wanted control.

THE GRAND JURY

Anyone with even scant familiarity of prosecutions and grand juries knows that a prosecutor usually gets what he or she wants.  They feed the grand jury the evidence they want to present, in the order they want to present it, to grand jury members who rely on their legal expertise; they also restrict the grand jury in a number of ways.  It is relatively easy, if that’s what the prosecutor wants, to convince  9 (the required number in an indictment; unanimity is not required) of 12 members of a grand jury of probable cause and preponderance of evidence.  In fact, it is expressed, subtly and sometimes even overtly, when the prosecutor “wants to take this case to trial,” and a prosecutor can usually take a case to trial even when a grand jury fails to indict.  It also happens, way more times than not, that the prosecutor simply fails to bring a case to the grand jury—grand juries being reserved for notable cases of serious potential felonies (that the prosecutor chooses to bring to them).

McCulloch effectively used, after initial piecemeal feeding, document overload on the grand jury.  Confuse and overwhelm.  Busy people with personal and professional lives outside the legal system often defer to the “experts” when information overload hits.

Clashing evidence was not examined in open court but spoon fed in a secretive grand jury “process.” Witnesses favorable to Wilson were discredited too—but not by local prosecutors, only federal prosecutors.  One woman who backed Wilson’s story to a T was found to have completely lied.

Why was a preliminary hearing not used instead of a grand jury?  That would have been something open to the public, with judges and lawyers present instead of only the grand jury and the intimidating prosecutor.  After all, half of states effectively don’t even use grand juries anymore. 

Because effectively the potential defendant has to request one.  And Officer Wilson knew he had a much better chance of things going his way if it was kept closed, under the direction of a prosecutor that he had a working relationship with.

After all, grand juries almost never indict police officers.

Prosecutors misled the grand jurors that cops are allowed to, in any circumstance, shoot suspects that are trying to flee.  That is profoundly untrue, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1985.  Either the prosecutors are incompetent, or they were deliberately deceptive in trying to shade the evidence.  The more surface facts that are peeled back from this case, the more muddled (and disturbing) it becomes.

Questioning of witnesses and Wilson were by no means equitable, as the New York Times relates, and seemed driven by the need to feed a narrative to support a decision that had been predetermined:

“But the gentle questioning of Officer Wilson revealed in the transcripts, and the sharp challenges prosecutors made to witnesses whose accounts seemed to contradict his narrative, have led some to question whether the process was as objective as Mr. McCulloch claims.”

“Though the prosecutors did not press Officer Wilson and other law enforcement officials about some contradictions in their testimony, they did challenge other witnesses about why their accounts had varied.”

“The medical examiner described the succession of bullet wounds to the chest and face that, in his view, would not have immediately incapacitated Mr. Brown. The prosecutors repeatedly questioned the doctor about this, driving home that Mr. Brown could have still been mobile (and dangerous) after the initial gunshot wounds.  They seemed intent on emphasizing this point, which supports Officer Wilson’s description of Mr. Brown lunging toward him despite serious wounds.”

“’We were trying to give you a balanced presentation of the evidence,’ Sheila Whirley, one of the prosecutors, told the jurors in summary. ‘And I think you are going to make the right decision.’”

We have no way of knowing how many jurors voted for what.  All we know of the grand jury of 7 men and 5 women, 9 whites and 3 blacks, is that nine or more did NOT vote to indict.  Eight could have voted to indict.  Or maybe only three voted to indict.  Maybe it was divided along racial lines, maybe it wasn’t.  It’s a secret process and that it is can be both a benefit and a drawback.

What seems clear is that it was under the strong, molding hand of the prosecution.  An odd thing if one was really just trying to uncover the truth and make a determination.

And take a look at that jury composition again.  While that may have been a jury of one’s peers for White Wilson, it wasn’t for African-American Brown, and it didn’t reflect the community, only further accentuating how disconnected the police are from the community, and why there are really separate “justice” systems.