On Nov. 24, the Missouri Grand Jury declared no indictment for Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson. Wilson shot 18-year-old Michael Brown on Aug. 9, igniting a series of protests that led to the looting of stores, setting of fires and the arrest of hundreds of protesters in cities across the nation.
The grand jury, composed of 12 citizens, was presented evidence by county prosecutor Bob McCulloch, in order to decide whether to indict Wilson.
To begin with, McCulloch was far from the unbiased prosecutor needed for this case. African-American leaders cited his controversial past of siding with the police and requested that a special prosecutor replace McCulloch on the Brown case. The request was backed by a petition with 70,000 signatures, but all came to naught — McCulloch flatly refused, insisting that he’s “done a very good job.”
It’s no wonder that community members don’t trust the police. And despite Wilson’s blatant denial of any possible racial tensions in his ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos, statistics show an overwhelmingly white police force (of 53 police officers, three were black) in contrast to a black majority in the community. Wilson claimed that he “did his job right” when he shot an unarmed Brown six times “out of self-defense.”
In his grand jury testimony, Wilson said, “It looks like a demon; that’s how angry he looked.” It’s outrageous that Wilson refers to Brown with the inhuman pronoun “it,” describes him with bestial terms like “demon” and “Hulk Hogan” and still insists that he has no racial bias.
Wilson continued to paint this picture of a monster, saying that Brown made “a grunting, aggravated sound” and that after several shots, “[Brown] was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him.”
“[Wilson’s description of Brown] sits flush with a century of stereotypes and a bundle of recent research on implicit bias and racial perceptions of pain,” said Jamelle Bouie, writer for the Slate Magazine. “In so many words, Wilson describes the ‘black brute,’ a stock figure of white supremacist rhetoric in the lynching era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries … To the white public, the ‘black brute’ was a menacing, powerful creature who could withstand the worst punishment.”
And regardless of racial implications, is it possible to justify the six shots that hit Brown — one of which entered the top of his skull — out of “self-defense”?
Deep-rooted racism in American culture aside, the legal process was ridden with errors — mistakes that are hotly debated in terms of whether or not they were intentional toward getting Wilson a non-indictment.
Before Wilson testified to the grand jury, assistant district attorney Kathy Alizadeh passed out copies of an outdated statute regarding police officers’ use of force, a portion of which stated that it was legal to shoot fleeing suspects simply because they are fleeing. It was a 1979 Missouri law that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in 1985.
This shockingly subpar, unprofessional quality of district attorneys only continued: Alizadeh, who corrected her mistake weeks later and distributed updated copies, never clarified what portion of the statute was ruled unconstitutional.
According to Justice Antonin Scalia in 1992 in United States vs. Williams, the purpose of a grand jury is “only to examine upon what foundation [the charge] is made by the prosecutor … The suspect under investigation by the grand jury [has never] been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.”
Wilson, however, testified for hours. According to CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin, Wilson’s account was “fancible and not credible,” and the cross examination was filled with “softball questions” from the prosecutors who “treated him with such kid gloves.”
Adding to controversial accounts and evidence, the Ferguson police department claimed that Brown’s distance from Wilson’s car was 35 feet, but activist Shaun King posted a video in which he measured the very length himself, a distance that came out to be around 130 feet.
Police officers have too wide a leeway in self-defense. According to Brown’s attorney, Michael Brown’s law (body cameras on all police officers) could solve “this game of witnesses, mirrors and secret grand jury proceedings.” Juries could decide whether such confrontations are justifiable by self defense instead of blindly taking the word of the police.
With such changes, Michael Brown’s father said, “We won’t have to see this play out over and over again all across this country.”
The FBI is currently conducting a federal investigation in Ferguson. This tragic case makes it clear that there is a need for reform in the quality of American policework and justice.
#staywoke Saratoga.