Tom Toles for November 26, 2014

A friend of mine served on a grand jury for six months. They went through scores of cases, perhaps a couple hundred. The prosecution offered the evidence. They took a vote. Indicted the accused. And move on to the next one. Though he never learned the final outcome, he was a little distressed that the jury NEVER failed to indict, not in ONE single case. Though he voted against indictment several times, indictment won by never less than a 2 to 1 margin. Indictment does mean guilt, of course. It means a trial. By legal definition, being indicted does not mean you aren’t innocent. It means the situation is ambiguous enough to warrant a full-blown trial, at least to a majority of the jurors. Grand juries don’t have to unanimous as petit juries do. I’ve read too many comments by police officers to think that Wilson handled this situation perfectly. Perhaps he would have been exonerated of criminal responsibility at a real trial. We’ll never know, now. I don’t think he is escaping punishment, deserved or not.

“And a 300lb teenager charging at you after already being shot?”

So you’ve already made up your mind, too, about which witnesses were lying or mistaken, and which were telling the truth?

How about if he was being shot at and he thought it the only way he could survive? How about if he was “standing his gound” as it were in self defence? How about if what he was on was foolish desperation? Then there is that drug known as adrenalin.How about if the first accounts by the witnesses closest to the action were correct, and he was actually in the act of giving up?The forensic evidence could be understood either way, after all.Maybe Wilson had no other choice. Maybe it was all Brown’s fault. Maybe Wilson brought on the whole situation by ill-considered action. Maybe he misread Brown’s actions. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying you don’t know. There is a word for judging when you don’t really know. It is called prejudice. Plenty of that going around in this case.

Few people seem interested in justice in this whole affair. They want vindication for their side, they want to place on the blame on one or the other of the two people involved, they want to win. Most people seem to have made up their minds within a day or two of the event, and haven’t changed them since. But justice? Who was interested in justice?

Yeah, beside Brown was in season and Wilson had a hunting license (a badge) and the mind set that all young, black males are dangerous.

The video of Brown stealing cigars and roughing up the clerk in the store show us that Brown wasn’t an innocent teenager heading to college. That said, he deserved a trail but Wilson took the place of judge, jury and executioner and should have been indicted. This is just more of what is going to be happening in our growing police state.

The PROSECUTOR is the one to be blamed…who ever heard of a prosecutor not pursuing a case wanting to win?Then defending the accused and denigrating the witnesses as liars?? HE presented them to the grand jury. There were several who were eyewitnesses who were credible but they weren’t the right color for the prosecutor. The Justice Dept should pursue this if there is to be ANY justice.

I suspect the prosecutor would not have filed charges under normal circumstances but given the lynch mob out in the street tried to make sure all of the evidence was presented. They did present all the witnesses.The Grand Jury did it’s job. They made the final determination, not the prosecutor or the lynch mob.

The thing that amazes me is that the Crawford case in Ohio doesn’t get more attention. A black guy’s in Walmart buying a bb gun (among other things) that the store sells legally. White patron calls police and reports “black man with gun”. Police arrive and shoot him in the back without warning – and they’re not indicted. But no media fuss. The media ambulance chases conflict, but somehow this one didn’t generate any.

And if this kid were white, would we have the same issues???

Let the punishment fit the crime: burn arsonists at the stake! (Yes, that does include white businessmen burning down their own places for the insurance money.)@logicaloneThese days, it’s hard to think of a reason cops shouldn’t all have cameras. The technology is both there and relatively cheap, after all. This time next year maybe the majority of cops in the country will be wired up. (Also better trained……..)

You are right with both comments.

In the days when Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry were practicing law, the defendant in a trial was not permitted to give sworn testify in his own case. I think you’re being unfair to Wilson. He may have told the exact truth about the incident, as he saw it, and as he remembered it. I have too often seen wildly different versions of the same event come from two different witnesses, and neither of them was (consciously or intentionally) lying. When John Adams defended the soldiers charged in the “Boston Massacre” incident in 1770, he believed that it was the administration who put those soldiers there, and provoked the anger of the people by ignoring their rights and treating them like second-class citizens, who was really responsible for the deaths of Samuel Gray, Patrick Carr, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell, and Crispus Attucks.“The Part I took in Defence of Captain Preston and the [eight] Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right.” — John AdamsIn his summation Adams said: “I will enlarge no more on the evidence, but submit it to you. – Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact; if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their own defense; if it was not so severe as to endanger their lives, yet if they were assaulted at all, struck and abused by blows of any sort, by snow-balls, oyster-shells, cinders, clubs, or sticks of any kind; this was a provocation, for which the law reduces the offense of killing, down to manslaughter, in consideration of those passions in our nature, which cannot be eradicated. To your candor and justice I submit the prisoners and their cause.” Seven of the defendants were acquitted, and two were convicted of manslaughter.Anyway, your remark – that the real culprit is the situation that had grown up in that community, in which the majority of the population and the police force had come to distrust each other so – reminded me of the story of Adams, who received death threats for defending those soldiers. Though there was no question that crowd was threatening those soldiers, yet the people of Boston in 1770, especially those who called themselves patriots, considered the soldiers murderers, and were angry that they got off so lightly.

Your casual use of “they” reveals your bigotry. The vast majority of the people, black and white, who have protested the death of Michael Brown have acted peacefully. Some did what they could to defend those businesses. And you actually used the phrase “lynch mob”! You say that the only thing that would satisfy “the protesters” was murder. Yet no one has died, other than Michael Brown of course. Yet while you are perfectly content to tar with the same brush everyone who protested against this killing, etc., you would be the first to deny that everyone is a racist who defended Wilson from day one, before any real evidence was in. And by the way, if the prosecutor filed charges ONLY because of public outrage, and not because the evidence was sufficiently ambiguous to justify bringing the matter to trial, then he was in dereliction of his duty.

Incredible. It seems that half the country are just blindly accepting the cop’s account, which, by the way, has so many internal contradictions that at least some of it has to be perjurous. It is a fact that all six known witnesses in the weeks between the shooting and the GJ agreed that that is not at all what happened, that the victim was assaulted by the cop — his head dragged through the patrol car window. Maybe one, even two witnesses might have recanted, but not all of them, no way. And witnesses on the cop’s side? Who are they and where did they come from? Nobody ever heard of them before the GJ announcement. Based on the trustworthy accounts, anything the victim did was justified as self-defense; he was fleeing for his life. Not shooting at someone whose hands were in the air from 150 feet away. One thing is certain: the cop is a gigantic coward.

Actually, audio from his radio indicates that Wilson knew about an alleged altercation — but there was no robbery; nobody working at the convenience store ever reported a robbery, or so they told the media. Strangely, the Ferguson PD said that Wilson didn’t know about any incident at the time. So either they lied then (about a week after the shooting) or later manufactured fake audio.

6’6"; 280 pounds and being sought for a violent crime, or being the size of Rodney King compared to the officers he contacted, is NOT “unarmed”, or “innocent”. Trayvon Martin was an unarmed teen, and had NOT violated any law, he was hunted down and murdered by a coward with a gun. Yes, there are differences.

It also disturbs me that the currrent media frenzy seems to make an officer killed in the line of duty the only “good cop”.

Sorry, but Wilson might have done something other than shoot to kill, but that wasn’t revealed by forensics. What WAS proven by forensic evidence was that he DID act “legally” within protocols for his own self-defense after being assaulted, and then trying to do his job, which was to secure the individual.

We’ve got another case proving however that bigots reside on BOTH sides of every racial conflict.

Interesting that “free fire” zones in Viet Nam, Iraq or Aghanistan are hunky dory, and with over 30 killings a day in the U.S., these singular cases always get all the attention, or is it ignorance?

Does this mean you and all the others posting here are going to accept the Benghazi reports?(you are quoting the Officer’s account, whom others report differently)

The Ferguson police chief admitted very early that Wilson knew nothing of what happened in the convenience store. He stopped Brown for walking in the middle of the deserted street, nothing more.

Perfect use of the word.A factoid is a questionable or spurious (unverified, false, or fabricated) statement presented as a fact, but without supporting evidence, although the term can have other meanings.

I think the unarmed teen was was Not given justice.