 |
| Robert P. McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, announced the grand jury's decision Monday at the courthouse in Clayton, Mo. Credit Pool photo by Cristina Fletes-Boutte |
N.Y. TIMES
Officer Darren Wilson will not be charged in the killing of Michael Brown, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch announced. A grand jury of nine whites and three blacks decided not to indict Wilson on counts ranging from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter. The grand jury reviewed evidence and heard witness testimony for three months after Brown, 18, was gunned down by Wilson on Aug. 8. McCulloch said he will release to the public evidence the grand jury reviewed to make its decision.
The non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson suggests that at least four members of the 12-person grand jury considering his case did not believe that Michael Brown stopped and surrendered with his hands up after fleeing a struggle at Wilson’s SUV, as several witnesses and protesters in Ferguson have always claimed.
===============================================
 |
THE GUARDIAN
Wilson was entitled under Missouri law to use deadly force against Brown for two main reasons: if he believed that Brown posed him or others a threat of death or serious injury, or if he believed that Brown was trying to escape and that if he got away he would pose that same threat of death or serious injury.
A pair of autopsy reports concluded that Brown was shot five to seven more times in the front, meaning that he must have turned to face the officer. So for Wilson to justify shooting Brown repeatedly in terms of self-defence, he needed to persuade jurors that having turned around, Brown once again threatened to do him physical harm.
A friend of Wilson told the Guardian in August the officer’s version was that Brown began charging towards him and would not stop, even after shots were fired. Brown did not halt until suffering a mortal wound to the head, according to this account. “He just kept coming,” the friend said, characterising Wilson’s recollection of the shooting.
David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St Louis and an authority on police shootings, said the autopsy evidence could have been seen to support Wilson’s account – specifically, that the fatal bullet to the apex of Brown’s head travelled downwards, suggesting a “body tilted forward from the waist”. Klinger said: “It’s not necessarily evidence that he was charging. But it is evidence that suggests he wasn’t standing still with his hands up.”
The Brown family’s attorneys said this wound suggested the 18-year-old bowed his head instinctively because he was being shot at. But Dr Michael Baden, the former New York City chief medical examiner who carried out the family’s own independent autopsy, said the fatal wound “could be consistent” with Brown charging. “It’s possible,” Baden said in August.
If convinced of Wilson’s basic account, however, jurors would also have needed to conclude that Wilson “reasonably” believed deadly force was necessary to stop Brown. Several factors would have been considered. “One would have been Brown’s size and Wilson’s size,” said Klinger. “If Mike Brown had not been 6ft 4in, almost 300lbs, and was instead 5ft 5in and weighed 110lbs, would it have been reasonable for a police officer to shoot him while he ran at the officer with nothing in his hands? Probably not.”
Another factor would have been the severity of injuries Wilson had already sustained. “If an officer is already injured, he is not reasonably going to sit there and let a guy beat him because he can’t use anything but his gun to defend himself,” said Klinger.
Ultimately, police officers are given broad latitude to defend their use of force as “reasonable” under the fourth amendment of the US constitution. The key supreme court ruling on the subject, Graham v Connor (1989), held that the calculation of reasonableness “must embody an allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second decisions about the amount of force necessary in a particular situation”. Delivering the court’s opinion, chief justice William Rehnquist said reasonableness “must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight”.
=============================================
 |
N.Y. TIMES (Cont'd)
In a lengthy news conference, Mr. McCulloch described the series of events, step by step, that had led to the shooting, and the enormous array of evidence and witnesses brought before the grand jury. He described an altercation inside Officer Wilson’s vehicle, after which Officer Wilson had Mr. Brown’s blood on his weapon, shirt and pants, the prosecutor said, as well as swelling and redness on his face.
Officer Wilson took the unusual step of testifying before the grand jury, appearing for more than four hours on an afternoon in September to defend his actions, and he said he was convinced that his life was in danger.
Since August, Officer Wilson has stayed close to St. Louis, reading news articles and following television coverage of the case, those close to him said. He has made no public statements or appearances. In a secret ceremony in October, he married his fiancée, Barbara Spradling, also a Ferguson police officer, court records show. Officer Wilson remains on paid administrative leave from the police department, but local officials said they expected that he would resign in the coming days.
At around noon that day, Mr. Brown and a friend encountered Officer Wilson walking down the middle of side street, Canfield Drive, in Ferguson. In his words, they were “walking along the double yellow line, single file,” forcing traffic to go around them. “Through the driver’s side window of his Chevrolet Tahoe, Officer Wilson issued an order: Leave the street and walk on the sidewalk.
According to Wilson, Brown replied, “Fuck what you have to say”—a retort Wilson described as “a very unusual and not expected response from a simple request.”
According to Wilson, Brown replied, “Fuck what you have to say”—a retort Wilson described as “a very unusual and not expected response from a simple request.”
After that, Wilson said, Brown and Johnson kept on walking. He noticed that Brown was holding a box of cigarillos and wearing a black shirt, meaning that he matched the profile of the suspect in a robbery at a local market, which he had heard about on his radio a bit earlier. Wilson said he radioed for assistance, reversed his car, angled it in front of Brown and Johnson to cut them off, and asked Brown to come over to him, which Brown did. But when the officer tried to open his door to get out, he recounted, Brown said, “What the fuck are you going to do about it,” and slammed the door shut.
From there, according to Wilson’s account, things rapidly deteriorated. After both of them tried to push the door, Brown got it closed and then came at him through the open window, and punched him in the face. Wilson tried to grab one of Brown’s arms to restrain him, he recalled, but “when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.” After being punched again, Wilson said, he considered reaching for his mace spray, but he was worried he’d get some of it in his own eyes, which would blind him, “and I would have been out of the game.” So he went for his gun, a Sig Sauer .40 pistol, which had twelve bullets in the magazine and one in the chamber, and said to Brown, “Get back or I am going to shoot you.”
At this point, Wilson testified, Brown “grabs my gun, says, ‘You are too much of a pussy to shoot me.’ ” Brown then pushed the gun down toward Wilson’s thigh, the officer went on, and a pulling match ensued, during which Wilson twice tried to shoot the gun, but it didn’t go off. Eventually, it did, blowing out one of the windows and drawing blood from somewhere on Brown’s body. The gunfire startled both of them, Wilson said. Brown took a step back, and then looked up at him with “the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked. He comes back towards me again with his hands up.”
Wilson tried to pull the trigger again, he testified, but the gun again failed to shoot, and Brown struck him. Wilson racked the slide on the top of his pistol and squeezed the trigger yet again, this time successfully. “When I look up, I see him start to run, and I see a cloud of dust behind him. I then get out of my car. As I’m getting out of the car, I tell dispatch, ‘Shots fired, send me more cars.’”
Accounts of what happened next differed widely. Mr. Brown’s friend said that Officer Wilson reached through the open window and grabbed Mr. Brown by the neck, choking and pulling him. Officer Wilson told the authorities that Mr. Brown was the aggressor, punching him in the face and scratching him on the neck. Pinned in his vehicle, according to his statements to the authorities, Officer Wilson feared for his life and, with his right hand, drew his gun from the holster.
As the two continued to struggle, Officer Wilson fired the gun twice, forensic evidence revealed. One shot hit Mr. Brown in the hand, a county autopsy found.
===============================================
 |
| Smoke fills the streets as some buildings are on fire after the announcement of the grand jury decision. Photograph: Jeff Roberson/AP |
Gunshots were heard in Ferguson and police deployed tear gas to disperse a growing crowd soon after the announcement, as potentially violent demonstrations broke out in several cities nationwide.
Demonstrators swelled into the streets in Chicago and New York City,