Caribbean legislators outraged over decision not to indict officer in Brown shooting
By Nelson A. King from Caribbean360
NEW YORK, United States, Wednesday November 26, 2014, CMC – Caribbean born legislators have expressed outrage over a grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri not to indict a white police officer who killed an unarmed 18-year-old black youth in August.
“On behalf of the people of the Ninth Congressional District of New York, I wish once again to share my condolences with the family of Michael Brown, whose efforts to secure justice on behalf of their son have been undermined by the decision of the grand jury, said Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants.
“The killing of Michael Brown and attacks by the Ferguson Police Department on the media and protesters demonstrate a reckless disregard for the civil rights and civil liberties of Americans of African descent and people of good will who seek justice in a nation with a long and tortured history of racial bias and discrimination against human beings in black bodies,” Clarke told the Caribbean Media Corporation
“The assumption that young men and young women who are African-American are inherently suspicious is a false assumption with deadly consequences, as witnessed and experienced by Black people from the inception of our nation to the present day.
“We must not allow this false assumption to prevail in our society. We cannot continue to accept the devaluation of African-American lives that resulted in the inhumane killing of Michael Brown and the failure of the grand jury to indict the police officer who killed him, on any charge, as well as in recent incidents such as the senseless killings of Eric Garner of Staten Island (New York) and Akai Gurley here in Brooklyn just last week, said Clarke, a member of the US House of Representatives Committee on Small Business, Ethics, and Homeland Security.
Clarke’s Democratic Congressional colleague in Brooklyn, Hakeem Jeffries, who represents the 8th Congressional District, also condemned the grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer, Darren Wilson.
“From Ferguson to Brooklyn, the zip codes may be different but the issue of police officers shooting young, unarmed African-American men without justification is exactly the same.
“Throughout this country, we need a dramatic change in the manner that law enforcement authorities engage communities of colour. The failure of the grand jury to indict Officer Darren Wilson is a miscarriage of justice.
“But justice delayed is not justice denied. We now need the federal civil rights investigation to take center stage, and do the right thing for the family of Michael Brown.
Grenadian American New York City Council Member Jumaane D. Williams, Deputy Leader and co-chair of the City Council’s Taskforce to Combat Gun Violence, said while the grand jury’s decision “for most of us were not surprising, it was disheartening nonetheless.
“It disturbed me that instead of deciding whether or not there was enough evidence existing to support an indictment, the jury essentially conducted a full trial,” Williams, who represents the 45th Council District in Brooklyn, also told CMC., adding “that was not the charge of a grand jury, as I understood it.
“In addition, many would want America to focus on minute details of this single case and ask that the verdict be accepted, but to do that would overlook the forest of much more dense and troubling trees,” he said, adding “perhaps it would be a reasonable request if history did not repeat itself time and time again.
“However, the killing of Michael Brown is not about one incident, but is another example of how all too often young black or brown unarmed men are being killed by the people who are paid to protect them. Even worse is when our justice system sends out a resounding message that it doesn’t care.
“Perhaps the call to examine this one case would be understandable if justice came more often, but we’ve seen these unjust acts in communities of more color for far too long,” Williams said.
Haitian-American New York State Assembly member-elect Rodneyse Bichotte, said she was “moved to protest this lack of justice, just as many in our community.
“A tragedy took place in Ferguson last summer; a family was robbed of their teenage son; a community faced off against an institution sworn to protect it; and, as President Obama acknowledged, we as a nation have been forced to confront the continuing story of tension between law enforcement and communities of colour, while the focus to make our streets safer has become secondary,” said Bichotte, who will be sworn in early January as the representative for the predominantly Caribbean 42nd Assembly District in Brooklyn.
The authorities have declared a state of emergency in Ferguson and police have clashed with demonstrators peeved at the grand jury’s decision.
IMAGE: new-york-protest-ferguson-shooting-740 TIMES SQUARE, NEW YORK PROTEST IN THE WAKE OF THE SHOOTING DEATH OF MICHAEL BROWN IN FERGUSON, MO (FLICKR/JASON ALLEN)
For more on this story go to: http://www.caribbean360.com/news/caribbean-legislators-outraged-over-decision-not-to-indict-officer-in-brown-shooting#ixzz3KCIYlOe5
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In Ferguson, Justice Department is ‘Last Game in Town’
By Zoe Tillman, The National Law Journal
All eyes are on the U.S. Department of Justice after last week’s announcement that a St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict a police officer in the death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.
Brown was shot and killed Aug. 9 by Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson. The Justice Department launched a criminal inquiry into Brown’s death and a broader civil rights probe into the Ferguson police department.
With the grand jury proceedings over, the Justice Department faces added pressure as the public waits for the outcome of its investigations, said William Yeomans, a former attorney in the department’s Civil Rights Division who serves on the faculty at American University Washington College of Law.
“They are the last game in town,” Yeomans said.
But Yeomans and other former federal prosecutors said they didn’t expect the grand jury’s decision to affect how the Justice Department carried out its investigations.
“These are complicated, difficult cases, and the Civil Rights Division will do the kind of thorough and thoughtful investigation that they usually do. That will be true independent of the grand jury’s decision,” said Edward Siskel, a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr who served in the White House Counsel’s office and as an associate deputy attorney general.
Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. released a statement—after the grand jury’s decision—confirming that the department’s investigations were ongoing. Federal civil rights law imposed “a high legal bar in these types of cases,” Holder said, but federal investigators “have resisted forming premature conclusions.”
“Though we have shared information with local prosecutors during the course of our investigation, the federal inquiry has been independent of the local one from the start, and remains so now,” Holder said.
The grand jury’s decision underscored the difficulty prosecutors at all levels face in pursuing criminal charges against an individual police officer, Siskel said.
“The burden of proof on the government to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer intentionally deprived the victim of his constitutional rights under color of law, is a hard one to meet,” Siskel said.
President Barack Obama, in his remarks after the grand jury’s decision was announced, said he had asked Holder to work with cities to build better relationships between law enforcement and communities. Siskel, who left the executive branch in May, said he did not think the White House would get involved in the details of the department’s Ferguson investigations.
The Justice Department under Holder has aggressively pursued civil rights inquiries into alleged police misconduct. Since 2009, the department opened 20 such investigations and was enforcing 14 agreements for reforms with law enforcement agencies across the country, according to Holder’s statements in September announcing the Ferguson probe.
The investigations are lengthy and resource-intensive, said Mayer Brown partner Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor in Illinois and the former chief administrator of the Chicago Police Department’s Office of Professional Standards. She predicted it would be months, not weeks, before the Justice Department concluded the civil rights probe in Ferguson.
“That’s a pretty significant undertaking, and it would not surprise me if we don’t hear for a while,” she said.
Agreements between the Justice Department and state and local law enforcement agencies typically take the form of consent decrees—settlements that are subject to court oversight. The department can also reach agreements that don’t need to go before a judge.
Yeomans said that if the Justice Department found civil rights violations in Ferguson, he expected to see a consent decree reached. If officials couldn’t reach an agreement, prosecutors could pursue a lawsuit, but he thought that was an unlikely outcome.
“I just don’t think Ferguson has a leg to stand on. We have seen enough on television and read enough about their practices to know that they need systemic reform,” Yeomans said. “I think in the end they’re going to be very open to what Main Justice proposes.”
Litigation could still come out of any agreement reached in Ferguson. In Seattle police officers filed a lawsuit in May challenging a consent decree reached between the Justice Department and the city’s police department. The officers are appealing the October dismissal of their case.
The Justice Department announced in September that it would work with the St. Louis County police department to review its response to the large demonstrations that took place around Ferguson after Brown’s death.
Lawyers from across the country have traveled to Ferguson to monitor the demonstrations and represent arrested individuals, and those efforts have continued following the grand jury announcement.
Yeomans said he hoped federal investigators moved as “expeditiously” as possible. “Demonstrating there is going to be systemic reform in the Ferguson police department will be crucial to bringing some semblance of peace to the community,” he said.
Officer Darren Wilson’s story is unbelievable. Literally.
From VOX
The St. Louis county officials released photos of Officer Darren Wilson after his altercation with Michael Brown.
We’ve finally heard from Officer Darren Wilson.
Wilson had been publicly silent since the events of August 9, when he shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And, even as the grand jury announced its decision not to indict him, he remained silent. He had his attorneys release a statement on his behalf.
But on Monday night, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch released the evidence given to the grand jury, including the interview police did with Wilson in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. And so we got to read, for the first time, Wilson’s full, immediate account of his altercation with Brown.
And it is unbelievable.
I mean that in the literal sense of the term: “difficult or impossible to believe.” But I want to be clear here. I’m not saying Wilson is lying. I’m not saying his testimony is false. I am saying that the events, as he describes them, are simply bizarre. His story is difficult to believe.
The story Wilson tells goes like this:
At about noon on August 9th, Wilson hears on the radio that there’s a theft in progress at the Ferguson Market. The suspect is a black male in a black shirt.
Moments later, Wilson sees two young black men walking down the yellow stripe in the center of the street. He pulls over. “Hey guys, why don’t you walk on the sidewalk?” They refuse. “We’re almost at our destination,” one of them replies. Wilson tries again. “But what’s wrong with the sidewalk?” he asks.
And then things get weird.
Brown’s response to “what’s wrong with the sidewalk?”, as recorded by Wilson, is “**** what you have to say.” Remember, Wilson is a uniformed police officer, in a police car, and Brown is an 18-year-old kid who just committed a robbery. And when asked to use the sidewalk, Wilson says Brown replied, “**** what you have to say.”
WILSON SAYS BROWN REPLIED, “**** WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY.”
Wilson backs his car up and begins to open the door. “Hey, come here,” he said to the kid who just cursed at him. He says Brown replied, “What the **** you gonna do?” And then Brown, in Wilson’s telling, slams the car door closed. Wilson tries to open the door again, tells Brown to get back, and then Brown leans into the vehicle and begins punching him.
Let’s take a breath and recap. Wilson sees two young black men walking in the middle of the street. He pulls over and politely asks them to use the sidewalk. They refuse. He asks again, still polite. Brown tells Wilson — again, a uniformed police officer in a police car — “**** what you have to say.” Wilson stops his car, tries to get out, and Brown slams the car door on him and then begins punching him through the open window.
What happens next is the most unbelievable moment in the narrative. And so it’s probably best that I just quote Wilson’s account at length on it.
I was doing the, just scrambling, trying to get his arms out of my face and him from grabbing me and everything else. He turned to his…if he’s at my vehicle, he turned to his left and handed the first subject. He said, “here, take these.” He was holding a pack of — several packs of cigarillos which was just, what was stolen from the Market Store was several packs of cigarillos. He said, “here, hold these” and when he did that I grabbed his right arm trying just to control something at that point. Um, as I was holding it, and he came around, he came around with his arm extended, fist made, and went like that straight at my face with his…a full swing from his left hand.
So Brown is punching inside the car. Wilson is scrambling to deflect the blows, to protect his face, to regain control of the situation. And then Brown stops, turns to his left, says to his friend, “Here, hold these,” and hands him the cigarillos stolen from Ferguson Market. Then he turns back to Wilson and, with his left hand now freed from holding the contraband goods, throws a haymaker at Wilson.
Every b-s detector in me went off when I read that passage. Which doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen exactly the way Wilson describes. But it is, again, hard to imagine. Brown, an 18-year-old kid holding stolen goods, decides to attack a cop and, while attacking him, stops, hands his stolen goods to his friend, and then returns to the beatdown. It reads less like something a human would do and more like a moment meant to connect Brown to the robbery.
Wilson next recounts his thought process as he reached for a weapon. He considered using his mace, but at such close range, the mace might get in his eyes, too. He doesn’t carry a taser with a fireable cartridge, but even if he did, “it probably wouldn’t have hit [Brown] anywhere”. Wilson couldn’t reach his baton or his flashlight. So he went for his gun.
Brown sees him go for the gun. And he replies: “You’re too much of a ******* pussy to shoot me.”
“YOU’RE TOO MUCH OF A ******* PUSSY TO SHOOT ME.”
Again, stop for a moment and think about that. Brown is punching Wilson, sees the terrified cop reaching for his gun, and says “You’re too much of a ******* pussy to shoot me.” He dares him to shoot.
And then Brown grabs Wilson’s gun, twists it, and points it at Wilson’s “pelvic area”. Wilson regains control of the firearm and gets off a shot, shattering the glass. Brown backs up a half step and, realizing he’s unharmed, dives back into the car to attack Wilson. Wilson fires again, and then Brown takes off running. (You can see the injuries Wilson sustained from the fight in these photographs.)
Wilson exits the car to give chase. He yells at Brown to get down on the ground. Here, I’m going to go back to Wilson’s words:
When he stopped, he turned, looked at me, made like a grunting noise and had the most intense, aggressive face I’ve ever seen on a person. When he looked at me, he then did like the hop…you know, like people do to start running. And, he started running at me. During his first stride, he took his right hand put it under his shirt into his waistband. And I ordered him to stop and get on the ground again. He didn’t. I fired multiple shots. After I fired the multiple shots, I paused a second, yelled at him to get on the ground again, he was still in the same state. Still charging, hand still in his waistband, hadn’t slowed down.
The stuff about Brown putting his hand in his waistband is meant to suggest that Wilson had reason to believe Brown might pull a gun. But it’s strange. We know
Brown didn’t have a gun. And that’s an odd fact to obscure while charging a police officer.
Either way, at that point, Wilson shoots again, and kills Brown.
There are inconsistencies in Wilson’s story. He estimates that Brown ran 20-30 feet away from the car and then charged another 10 feet back towards Wilson. But we know Brown died 150 feet away from the car.
There are also consistencies. St Louis prosecutor Robert McCulloch said that Brown’s DNA was found inside Wilson’s car, suggesting there was a physical altercation inside the vehicle. We know shots were fired from inside the car. We know Brown’s bullet wounds show he was only hit from the front, never from the back.
But the larger question is, in a sense, simpler: Why?
Why did Michael Brown, an 18-year-old kid headed to college, refuse to move from the middle of the street to the sidewalk? Why would he curse out a police officer? Why would he attack a police officer? Why would he dare a police officer to shoot him? Why would he charge a police officer holding a gun? Why would he put his hand in his waistband while charging, even though he was unarmed?
NONE OF THIS FITS WITH WHAT WE KNOW OF MICHAEL BROWN
None of this fits with what we know of Michael Brown. Brown wasn’t a hardened felon. He didn’t have a death wish. And while he might have been stoned, this isn’t how stoned people act. The toxicology report did not indicate he was on PCP or something that would’ve led to suicidal aggression.
Which doesn’t mean Wilson is a liar. Unbelievable things happen every day. The fact that his story raises more questions than it answers doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
But the point of a trial would have been to try to answer these questions. We would have either found out if everything we thought we knew about Brown was wrong, or if Wilson’s story was flawed in important ways. But now we’re not going to get that chance. We’re just left with Wilson’s unbelievable story.
For more on this story go to: http://www.vox.com/2014/11/25/7281165/darren-wilsons-story-side
iNews Cayman EDITOR: I cannot agree with everything the author concludes because arrogant teenagers who are stoned are not rational (actually you don’t have to be arrogant or a teenager not to be rational if you’re stoned especially with racial overtones) therefore the first part of Wilson’s take on it can make sense to me and be believed. The real piece that I have real problems with is the business of Brown putting his hand in his waistband when he charged at Wilson. By Brown doing this is the perfect reason that gives Wilson a reason to believe Brown may suddenly have a gun. Where it would have come from is another matter.
Grand juries have indicted people on much less but then Wilson is a police officer. I had best stop there before I get myself into trouble. I have to say it would have better for everyone if there had been an indictment.
Whatever the grand jury had come up with I fear would not have made one bit of difference to the disgusting violence and mayhem that followed.
We live in a society that our young adults from the time they were children are fed a diet of violent computer games. We should all take some of the blame.
See also in today’s iNews Cayman From the police perspective: Why Officer Darren Wilson wasn’t indicted at link: http://www.policeone.com/ferguson/articles/7782643-Why-Officer-Darren-Wilson-wasnt-indicted/
