There are no
easy answers in the Michael Brown shooting. Unless some citizen who has been in
a coma for the last three months magically appears with actual video footage of
the incident, we will never know for sure what happened that hot afternoon last
August. The most reliable witness claims that officer Darren Wilson provoked
Brown. Wilson says Brown attacked him. And that is all we have: two conflicting
accounts, both with the motivation to lie.
The witness
in question, Dorian Johnson was Brown's best friend --as well as his accomplice
in the robbery which precipitated the event--and Wilson, for his part, would
potentially be found guilty of murder, excessive use of force, and possibly a
hate crime if it turned out he had fired twelve rounds at a suspect who was
trying to surrender.
Even the
Ferguson DA's office had motive to be less than forthright in choosing the
method by which Wilson was to be questioned. A grand jury investigation in
cases like this is typically chosen by a prosecutor so that he or she can to
some degree control the outcome. That is to say that a grand jury gives the
prosecution to cherry-pick the evidence to some degree in order to steer the
jury towards the outcome that the prosecutor desires.
While that
system in and of itself appears to be in desperate need of revision, the
curious thing in this case is that Missouri prosecutor, Robert McCulloch turned
over all the evidence that was
available to the jurors. On its surface this fact sounds reasonable, but in
reality what McCulloch did was in effect to muddy the waters of due process and
make it nearly impossible for any
grand jury--let alone this one-- to be effective in fairly making a decision
about whether or not to indict. McCulloch didn't even cross-examine Wilson,
which is also highly suspicious considering that is an ideal and commonly used
tactic in acquiring a grand jury indictment.
If one
didn't know better, one might think that this particular prosecutor didn't want
to be the one left holding the bag in a controversial case involving yet
another white cop shooting and killing another unarmed black teen. There is
little upside for a prosecutor trying a case like this, especially when the
evidence at hand is not open and shut. If he wins, he will be treated as a
pariah by the police; if he loses, he is the enemy of the minority population
and the one to be blamed for the subsequent unrest, looting and rioting. In
turning the decision over to a grand jury, manipulating the evidence in ways
contrary to his formal training, and giving the jury an unprecedented amount of
latitude, McCulloch effectively recused himself from the proceedings.
Maybe Wilson
is in fact innocent. Maybe Michael Brown did attack him without provocation.
Maybe a trial would've discovered, at the very least criminal negligence on
Wilson's part or, perhaps a surprise witness would've surfaced condemning him
as a racist and a cold-blooded murderer. Alas, we will never find that out now;
but with cowards like Robert McCulloch overseeing the ways in which we
administer justice, is Wilson's guilt or innocence really the point?
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