Revealing information.....
By
AJ Vicens
After
St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced Monday that Ferguson police
officer Darren Wilson
would not be indicted for killing Michael Brown,
the county released a collection of documents from the grand jury proceedings.
Among them were hundreds of photos from the investigation, depicting everything
from the crime scene to Wilson at the hospital after the shooting. Here are just
a few. (All photos provided by the St. Louis County Prosecutor's Office.)
[READ MORE]
THIS
WEEK'S NEWS ROUNDUP
As
the holiday season began for Americans this week, tensions in Ferguson, Missouri
over the killing of unarmed teen Michael Brown took center stage. A federal
grand jury chose
not to indict the officer who shot him, leading
to a tidal wave of protests across the country. Testimony and evidence from the
case were released to the public shortly after the decision was made,
revealing details from officer Darren Wilson's
description of events. He described Mike Brown as a "demon" and "Hulk Hogan,"
though Wilson is in fact not much smaller in size than Brown was.
In
a separate case, Texas evangelicals are
trying to rescue a mentally ill inmate from being
executed. In Ohio, an
extreme "secret executions" bill could pass.
And,
as Thanksgiving and Black Friday grow nearer, some lawmakers are
fighting to separate the two and keep
Thanksgiving safe from greedy retailers who are creeping in on family time.
[READ MORE]
He criticized the media, talked about witness testimony that didn't match physical evidence and he did it at night, as a city already on edge waited to learn if a grand jury would indict a white Ferguson police officer in the shooting death of an unarmed black 18-year-old.
By ANDALE GROSS and TAMMY WEBBER
The Associated Press Posted Nov. 27, 2014
FERGUSON, Mo. — He criticized the media. He talked about witness testimony that didn't match physical evidence. And he did it at night, as a city already on edge waited to learn if a grand jury would indict a white Ferguson police officer in the shooting death of an unarmed black 18-year-old.
St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch — whose impartiality has been questioned since soon after Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9 — has come under renewed scrutiny since he appeared before television cameras to announce that the grand jury would not indict Wilson. A defensive McCulloch repeatedly cited what he said were inconsistencies and erroneous witness accounts. He never mentioned that Brown was unarmed.
Attorneys for Brown's family and activists said Tuesday that everything from how evidence was presented to the grand jury to the way McCulloch delivered the news of its decision bolstered their belief that the outcome was predetermined by McCulloch, who has deep family roots and relationships with police.
"This grand jury decision, we feel, is a reflection of the sentiment of those that presented the evidence," Anthony Gray, an attorney for Brown's family, said at a news conference.
Gray questioned, for example, why prosecutors presented testimony of witnesses who clearly did not see the shootings, rather than make a case for some type of charges. He also said it was unclear how the evidence was presented.
Activists and Brown family attorneys had asked McCulloch — whose father, a police officer, was killed while responding to a call involving a black suspect — to appoint a special prosecutor.
He instead asked a grand jury to decide if there was enough evidence to bring charges, and assigned prosecutors in his office to present the evidence because he was "fully aware of unfounded but growing concern that the investigation might not be fair," he said Monday.
McCulloch said the jury of nine whites and three blacks met on 25 separate days over three months, hearing more than 70 hours of testimony from about 60 witnesses, including three medical examiners and experts on blood, toxicology and firearms and other issues.
"The duty of the grand jury is to separate fact from fiction," McCulloch said, adding that the panelists were "the only people that have heard and examined every witness and every piece of evidence."
Convening a grand jury was a somewhat unusual move but not necessarily wrong, experts said.
"Ordinarily a prosecutor uses the grand jury as a rubber stamp, and people complain about that. This time, he went to the grand jury because he wanted them to take the political heat for a difficult decision, and he gave the grand jurors an overload of information," said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who teaches criminal law at Loyola University in Los Angeles. "So now people are criticizing that because the prosecutor's not taking responsibility for the decision."
David Sklansky, a criminal-law professor at Stanford University Law School, said the case in some ways underscores weaknesses in the grand jury system: "Grand juries don't do a terrific job as a check on overzealous prosecutors, but they're even worse as an independent check on a prosecutor who might be under-zealous," he said, adding he was not saying that necessarily was the case with McCulloch's office.
But some in Ferguson also were angry about how McCulloch handled the announcement of the grand jury decision — including his timing, his emphasis on witnesses whose memories did not match physical evidence and his claim that the media reports helped fan the flames of distrust back in August, when the shooting sparked widespread rioting and looting. The city erupted again Monday night after McCulloch spoke, with protesters smashing windows, looting and setting buildings and cars on fire.
"The way (McCulloch) just read off the whole speech was kind of like he was making a mockery of the whole situation," said 20-year-old Darnesha Tabor of Hazelwood, who handed out bottled water on Tuesday in Ferguson.
She also said announcing the decision just before 8:30 p.m. Monday, when many protesters already had gathered in Ferguson, was a mistake.
McCulloch spokesman Ed Magee said that gave schools time to get children home and businesses time to let employees leave.
Associated Press reporters Gene Johnson in Seattle and David A. Lieb in Ferguson contributed to this story.
http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20141127/NEWS/141129484/101015/NEWSLETTER100
Some witnesses said Michael Brown had been shot in the back. Another said he was face-down on the ground when Officer Darren Wilson "finished him off."
By HOLBROOK MOHR, DAVID A. LIEB
and PHILLIP LUCAS
The Associated Press Posted Nov. 27, 2014
FERGUSON, Mo. — Some witnesses said Michael Brown had been shot in the back. Another said he was face-down on the ground when Officer Darren Wilson "finished him off." Still others acknowledged changing their stories to fit published details about the autopsy or admitted that they did not see the shooting at all.
An Associated Press review of thousands of pages of grand jury documents reveals numerous examples of statements made during the shooting investigation that were inconsistent, fabricated or provably wrong. For one, the autopsies ultimately showed Brown was not struck by any bullets in his back.
Prosecutors exposed these inconsistencies before the jurors, which likely influenced their decision not to indict Wilson in Brown's death.
Bob McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, said the grand jury had to weigh testimony that conflicted with physical evidence and conflicting statements by witnesses as it decided whether Wilson should face charges.
"Many witnesses to the shooting of Michael Brown made statements inconsistent with other statements they made and also conflicting with the physical evidence. Some were completely refuted by the physical evidence," McCulloch said.
The decision Monday not to charge Wilson with any crime set off more violent protests in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson and around the country, fueled by claims that the unarmed black 18-year-old was shot while surrendering to the white officer in the mostly African-American city.
What people thought were facts about the Aug. 9 shooting have become intertwined with what many see as abuses of power and racial inequality in America.
And media coverage of the shooting's aftermath made it into the grand jury proceedings. Before some witnesses testified, prosecutors showed jurors clips of the same people making statements on TV.
Their inconsistencies began almost immediately after the shooting, from people in the neighborhood, the friend walking with Brown during the encounter and even one woman who authorities suggested probably wasn't even at the scene at the time.
Jurors also were presented with dueling versions from Wilson and Dorian Johnson, who was walking with Brown during the Aug. 9 confrontation. Johnson painted Wilson as provoking the violence, while Wilson said Brown was the aggressor.
But Johnson also declared on TV, in a clip played for the grand jury, that Wilson fired at least one shot at his friend while Brown was running away: "It struck my friend in the back."
Johnson held to a variation of this description in his grand jury testimony, saying the shot caused Brown's body to "do like a jerking movement, not to where it looked like he got hit in his back, but I knew, it maybe could have grazed him, but he definitely made a jerking movement."
Other eyewitness accounts also were clearly wrong.
One woman, who said she was smoking a cigarette with a friend nearby, claimed she saw a second police officer in the passenger seat of Wilson's vehicle. When quizzed by a prosecutor, she elaborated: The officer was white, "middle age or young" and in uniform. She said she was positive there was a second officer — even though there was not.
Another woman testified that she saw Brown leaning through the officer's window "from his navel up," with his hand moving up and down, as if he were punching the officer. But when the same witness returned to testify again on another day, she said she suffers from mental disorder, has racist views and that she has trouble distinguishing the truth from things she had read online.
Prosecutors suggested the woman had fabricated the entire incident and was not even at the scene the day of the shooting.
Another witness had told the FBI that Wilson shot Brown in the back and then "stood over him and finished him off." But in his grand jury testimony, this witness acknowledged that he had not seen that part of the shooting, and that what he told the FBI was "based on me being where I'm from, and that can be the only assumption that I have."
The witness, who lives in the predominantly black neighborhood where Brown was killed, also acknowledged that he changed his story to fit details of the autopsy that he had learned about on TV.
"So it was after you learned that the things you said you saw couldn't have happened that way, then you changed your story about what you seen?" a prosecutor asserted.
"Yeah, to coincide with what really happened," the witness replied.
Another man, describing himself as a friend of Brown's, told a federal investigator that he heard the first gunshot, looked out his window and saw an officer with a gun drawn and Brown "on his knees with his hands in the air." He added: "I seen him shoot him in the head."
But when later pressed by the investigator, the friend said he had not seen the actual shooting because he was walking down the stairs at the time and instead had heard details from someone in the apartment complex.
"What you are saying you saw isn't forensically possible based on the evidence," the investigator told the friend.
Shortly after that, the friend asked if he could leave.
"I ain't feeling comfortable," he said.
Associated Press writers Michael Kunzelman, Catherine Lucey, Nomaan Merchant, Garance Burke, Jeff Donn, David B. Caruso and Paul Weber contributed to this report.
An updated interactive about the Ferguson grand jury is available here:
http://hosted.ap.org/interactives/2014/ferguson-shooting/
http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20141127/NEWS/141129486/101015/NEWSLETTER100
