Ferguson grand jury decision: the latest updates

After a grand jury decided not to indict former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch suggested in a press conference that the grand jury’s decision was a result of unreliable eyewitness testimony.

The examples McCulloch used in his November 24 announcement focused on those who testified in favor of Brown, with McCulloch saying that the physical evidence rejected some of their descriptions of how the shooting played out.

The despair over the growing list of unarmed black men killed by police officers is impossible to ignore. For months, protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the country have made headlines, harnessed hashtags, and blocked traffic, yelling “black lives matter” and, more to the point, “don’t shoot” and “stop killing us!”

But are police officers — the most obvious recipients of these pleas — getting the protesters’ message? And if so, will the scrutiny of their peers’ conduct, among activists and in the media, make a difference in the way they do their jobs?

A grand jury has decided that Staten Island police officer Daniel Pantaleo will not face charges for killing Eric Garner, who died last July after Pantaleo placed him in a choke hold while arresting him for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes.

For many who wanted Pantaleo to be punished for Garner’s death, it’s a scandal that he has gotten away with what they see as a crime. But the bigger scandal is that what he did arguably wasn’t a crime at all. Our legal standards and legal system make it difficult — if not impossible — to prosecute police violence.

Protesters have taken to the streets of Ferguson since August to demonstrate against the Brown shooting and racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Despite occasional bouts of violence, the protests in Ferguson have been largely peaceful since August.

On Monday night’s The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart mocked Fox News and Fox Business hosts for their determination to negate the role of racism in the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri.

Stewart played a clip of Fox News’ Bernie Goldberg saying. “Ferguson, Missouri is not Selma, Alabama.” This was, of course, an effort to make the case that there were no legitimate civil rights issues motivating the protests, which followed the news that white police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for killing unarmed black teen Michael Brown.

White Americans are much more likely than black or Hispanic Americans to approve of the grand jury’s decision to not indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson for the August 9 shooting of Michael Brown, according to a new poll from ABC News and the Washington Post. About 58 percent of white people polled approve of the grand jury decision, while 9 percent of black people and 32 percent of Hispanic people do.

The racial divide found in the poll speaks to the racial disparities in the criminal justice system: both black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to be stopped or arrested by police than their white counterparts.

Demonstrators have been protesting in Ferguson since the Brown shooting on August 9, but protests picked up last week after the grand jury decision. The organized, daytime protests have been fairly peaceful, while some nighttime protests in the St. Louis area have occasionally devolved into violence — resulting in burned-up buildings and cars.

On Monday, students and workers around the country walked out of their jobs and classes in an organized #HandsUpWalkOut rally.

On Tuesday, the day after it was announced that police officer Darren Wilson wouldn’t be charged with a crime for the August 9 shooting death of unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown, a small group of protesters vented their frustrations with looting and vandalism in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, for the second night in a row.

This followed a day and evening filled with much larger, organized protests in Ferguson and across the country.

Ferguson, Missouri, protesters peacefully shut down multiple shopping malls and stores on Friday as they marched and called for justice for Michael Brown and other black men and boys recently killed by police, the Associated Press reported.

Following a grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown, protesters have upped their demonstrations against racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

St. Louis County prosecutors may have misled the grand jury investigating the police shooting of Michael Brown into believing that Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson was justified in shooting Brown merely because the unarmed black 18-year-old fled from the officer, according to a review of the grand jury documents by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.

Before Wilson testified to the grand jury on September 16, prosecutors gave grand jurors an outdated statute that said police officers can shoot a suspect that’s simply fleeing. This statute was deemed unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1985; the court ruled that a fleeing suspect must, at least in a police officer’s reasonable view, pose a dangerous threat to someone or have committed a violent felony to justify a shooting.

The chart shows many contradictions between some eyewitnesses — and lots of questions that went unanswered in different interviews.

There are two key points of near agreement: Brown was facing Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson as he was fired upon, and Brown did have his hands up during his final moments.

In the wake of the killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson, a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer, the public is taking a hard look at some of the systemic issues that can lead a white cop to kill an unarmed black teenager and not be charged with a crime.

Brown’s family is lobbying for “Michael Brown laws” that would require police to record interactions with civilians. Others, like my colleague Amanda Taub, are calling for legislators to rethink the laws that let police officers shoot anyone they “reasonably believe” poses a threat, or anyone fleeing a violent felony. As Taub put it, “the real scandal of police violence in Ferguson is what’s legal.“

Here’s the cover of next week’s New Yorker magazine, drawn by Bob Staake:

Staake, who lived in St. Louis for 17 years, writes about how he decided on the image for the New Yorker’s culture blog:

Michael Brown had marijuana in his system when Darren Wilson shot and killed him on August 9, according to the official and independent autopsies.

In the grand jury testimony released to the public Monday, both prosecutors and grand jurors seemed to push the idea that highly concentrated pot made Brown more likely to be aggressive — even when an unnamed medical expert insisted that it’s unlikely pot could make Brown attack Wilson.

Earlier today, I wrote that Officer Darren Wilson’s newly released account of his altercation with Michael Brown was unbelievable. Which isn’t to say it was wrong. It was just hard to believe that events played out exactly as Wilson described.

But the story Wilson tells makes much more sense if you also read it alongside Dorian Johnson’s testimony — and use the two accounts to balance each other out.

Following the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, prominent lawyer and MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Bloom argued on Twitter that St. Louis County prosecutors did a bad job questioning Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson about the shooting of Michael Brown. She argued the questioning was basically a “tea party,” far from the “grueling session” it should have been.

Read some of Bloom’s tweets:

Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson reportedly suggested to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that he would shoot unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown again.

Wilson claimed Brown was violent throughout the encounter, reaching for the officer’s gun and charging at him, according to Stephanopoulos’s retelling of the interview. While Wilson said he felt sorry for Brown’s family, he said he had a clean conscience about the encounter, was just doing his job, and wouldn’t do anything differently.

The Ferguson grand jury’s decision that Officer Darren Wilson should not be indicted for shooting Michael Brown is a reminder that many police misconduct cases never turn into criminal prosecutions.

But even when police officers do get tried for misconduct, the outcomes look very different than they do when civilians are prosecuted:

For more than three months after police officer Darren Wilson killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in the middle of a Ferguson, Missouri, street on August 9, it was difficult to get a full idea of what happened.

Wilson’s grand jury testimony was secret. But there were leaks, along with a few publicly available details about his life. He is 28 years old. Six months before the shooting, he won a commendation for “extraordinary effort in the line of duty.” He lived with his girlfriend (whom he married in secret in October). He had previously worked for a nearby police department that was so dysfunctional it was disbanded. Anonymous sources “close” to him told various news outlets that Brown had tried to grab Wilson’s gun and that Brown was charging at him before Wilson fired the fatal shots. A fuzzy picture of Wilson and his account emerged.

The grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson, MO, police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of unarmed teen Michael Brown inspired protest across the country Monday night. Though the outcome was dismaying to many, it really wasn’t a surprise. This is because of the way the prosecution structured the grand jury: there was a deliberate attempt to stuff the grand jury full of as much information as it could handle. And that the grand jury wouldn’t charge Wilson with a crime was a totally predictable consequence. Here’s why.

The reason that most grand juries don’t go very long, as Vox’s Amanda Taub has written, is they’re typically only looking at a selection of the evidence that’s been cherry-picked by the prosecutor. In the Ferguson case, however, St. Louis County Attorney Robert McCulloch’s office deliberately presented the grand jury with as much evidence as they could possibly find. The result? 25 meetings of the grand jury over more than three months, considering 24 written reports, at least 30 recorded interviews with at least 24 different witnesses, and interviews of several witnesses in the grand jury room itself. The panel’s transcripts — which were released Monday night after the grand jury’s decision was announced — come out to over 4,700 pages.

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.

Following the grand jury’s decision on November 24 to not indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson for shooting and killing Michael Brown, St. Louis County Attorney Robert McCulloch released all the evidence presented to the grand jury.

Within that evidence is the clearest insight we have yet into Wilson’s side of the story. Throughout, the police officer, who is reportedly in talks with his department to resign, used language that painted the black teen, a recent high school graduate who had been preparing to start college when he died, as a mindless brute — a giant capable of murdering him with a single punch. He compared himself to a small child in Brown’s presence.

In his statement announcing that the grand jury had decided not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown, St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch took the unusual step of attacking the credibility of many of the witnesses in the case.

McCulloch criticized witnesses for being inconsistent in their statements to the media and law enforcement, and for offering accounts of the shooting that were contradicted by the physical evidence collected from the scene: