MORE ON THE FERGUSON GRAND JURY DECISION

Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images


Jeffrey Toobin, New Yorker

Criminal procedure—the everyday rules of the road—gets a bad rap. It’s said to be rigid, routine, incapable of accommodating the nuances of human behavior. But, as the atypical grand-jury proceedings in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death illustrate, there is a great deal to be said for prosecutors following the customary rules of their profession.

To recap the relevant facts: Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old man, on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. Robert McCulloch, the local prosecutor, had the authority to charge Wilson with a crime; that’s how the vast majority of prosecutions in the area begin. Instead, McCulloch said that he was going to open a grand-jury investigation and, in an even rarer development, present every scrap of evidence produced in the investigation to the jurors for their consideration.

 

In Missouri, as elsewhere, grand juries are known as tools of prosecutors. In the famous words of Sol Wachtler, the former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich” if he wanted to. This is certainly true, but it is true, too, that grand juries retain at least a nominal independence. They usually do what prosecutors want, but they are not legally required to.

In sending Wilson’s case to the grand jury, McCulloch technically turned over to them the decision about whether to prosecute. By submitting all the evidence to the grand jury, he added to the perception that this process represented an independent evaluation of the evidence. But there is little doubt that he remained largely in control of the process; aggressive advocacy by prosecutors could have persuaded the grand jurors to vote for some kind of indictment. The standard for such charges—probable cause, or more probable than not—is generally a very easy hurdle. If McCulloch’s lawyers had simply pared down the evidence to that which incriminated Wilson, they would have easily obtained an indictment.

 

The grand jury chose not to indict Wilson for any crimes in connection with Brown’s death. In a news conference following the decision, McCulloch laid out the evidence that he believed supported the grand jury’s finding. In making the case for Wilson’s innocence, McCulloch cherry-picked the most exculpatory information from what was assembled before the grand jury. The conclusion may even have been correct; based on a preliminary review of the evidence before the grand jury, it’s not clear to me that a trial jury would have found Wilson guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

But the goal of criminal law is to be fair—to treat similarly situated people similarly—as well as to reach just results. McCulloch gave Wilson’s case special treatment. He turned it over to the grand jury, a rarity itself, and then used the investigation as a document dump, an approach that is virtually without precedent in the law of Missouri or anywhere else. Buried underneath every scrap of evidence McCulloch could find, the grand jury threw up its hands and said that a crime could not be proved. This is the opposite of the customary ham-sandwich approach, in which the jurors are explicitly steered to the prosecutor’s preferred conclusion. Some might suggest that all cases should be treated the way McCulloch handled Wilson before the grand jury, with a full-fledged mini-trial of all the incriminating and exculpatory evidence presented at this preliminary stage. Of course, the cost of such an approach, in both time and money, would be prohibitive, and there is no guarantee that the ultimate resolutions of most cases would be any more just. In any event, reserving this kind of special treatment for white police officers charged with killing black suspects cannot be an appropriate resolution.

 

Would Wilson have faced charges if he had been treated like every other suspect in McCulloch’s jurisdiction? We’ll never know—and that’s the real shame of this prosecutor’s approach.

==================================================
Book Forum



The Saint Louis County grand jury’s decision not to issue an indictment of police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown was at once appalling and entirely predictable. Grand juries usually defer to the will of the prosecutors who marshal the cases on their dockets, and Robert McCulloch, the district attorney in the Ferguson case, has a long track record of siding with the police during his twenty-five year career. This, too, can hardly come as a shock given his strong ties to the law enforcement community: McCulloch’s father, brother, nephew, and cousin were all Saint Louis police officers, and his father was killed in an incident involving a black suspect.

But while the formal legal system remains largely indifferent ...[when right-wing]  commentators are confronted with a case such as Ferguson, ....they try to shift the debate to new ground entirely, citing the alleged epidemic of black-on-black crime. Here, for example, is how former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani grandstanded before the cameras on Fox & Friends the day that the grand jury’s announcement came down: “The danger to a black child in America is not a white police officer,” he declared on an all-white panel. “That’s going to happen less than 1 percent of the time. The danger to a black child—if it was my child—the danger is another black.” He went on to advance this absurd claim for good measure: “There is virtually no homicide in the white community.”

Likewise, after George Zimmerman was acquitted for killing Trayvon Martin in 2013, a factoid distributed widely on conservative social media claimed, “In the 513 days between Trayvon dying, and today’s verdict, 11,106 African-Americans have been murdered by other African-Americans.” The fact-checking website Politifact discovered that the tidbit was “mostly false,” the apparent result of some shoddy calculations using crime statistics that were almost a decade old. But for many Americans, the point stood: Whites provoked by racial bias to kill black people is a non-issue when compared to the real problem of blacks killing other blacks.

This is the misguided racial zeitgeist into which veteran journalist Jill Leovy releases her powerful first book, Ghettoside, an in-depth account of a South Los Angeles murder and its subsequent investigation. Though she focuses on a single homicide in a small swath of the city, Leovy uses the narrative in Ghettoside to examine a host of larger questions about police conduct, violence, and racism in America. The result is a true-crime book that leaves the reader haunted not by its cast of criminals but by the society in which those criminals operate.

Leovy is perhaps best known for starting the Los Angeles Times’ Homicide Report in 2007. Struck by the disparity in how the media covered murder—with high-profile and salacious homicides always treated more prominently than the everyday violence that occurs in the less rich and famous communities of Southern California—Leovy launched a blog that set out to detail in equal terms every killing to take place in metro LA. The project, she reasoned, would bear witness to the idea that no life cut short by violence was worth less than any other.


Leovy writes early in Ghettoside of an acronym taken from the “unwritten code of the Los Angeles Police Department”: NHI—No Human Involved. It’s what some of the cops would say after coming upon the bodies of black men killed by other black men. “It was only the newest shorthand for the idea that murders of blacks somehow didn’t count,” she writes:

“Nigger’s life cheap now,” a white Tennessean offered during Reconstruction, when asked to explain why black-on-black killing drew so little notice.

A congressional witness a few years later reported that black men in Louisiana were killed and “a simple mention is made of it, perhaps orally or in print, and nothing is done. There is no investigation made.” A late-nineteenth-century Louisiana newspaper editorial said, “If negroes continue to slaughter each other, we will have to conclude that Providence has chosen to exterminate them in this way.” . . . An Alabama sheriff of the era was more concise: “One less nigger,” he said.

In short, for more than a century now, America has turned a blind eye toward murder in black communities, suggesting that many in the white mainstream regard the so-called black-on-black crime problem as something of a solution. (Indeed, Leovy caught one LA officer calling a successfully prosecuted gang killing “two for the price of one,” as one man was going to jail and the other was dead.) African-Americans caught stealing property or possessing marijuana are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but justice for murdered black people takes a back seat in most urban law-enforcement operations. The media won’t cover homicides in black communities—Leovy tells of parents literally begging journalists to write about their dead sons—and many cops approach these cases sluggishly, if at all. “In Jim Crow Mississippi,” Leovy writes, “killers of black people were convicted at a rate that was only a little lower than the rate that prevailed a half century later in L.A.—30 percent then versus about 36 percent in Los Angeles County in the early 1990s.”

At the center of Ghettoside, which takes its title from the term a Watts gang member used to describe his neighborhood, is the 2007 killing of eighteen-year-old Bryant Tennelle. Another young black man gunned Tennelle down as the victim was walking near his home in South Central—not an uncommon occurrence for the time and place. What was uncommon was that Tennelle’s father, Wally, was a well-respected homicide detective in the LAPD. Also uncommon was the detective assigned to the case, a determined bulldog of a man named John Skaggs.

White, Republican, and middle-aged at the time of Tennelle’s murder, Skaggs fit the stereotype of a cop who might have written off the shooting as an NHI case. But Skaggs was different. The son of a former homicide detective, he threw himself into his work the way many of his contemporaries didn’t, animated by the belief that every murdered person—black or white, gang member or not—deserved a good detective working on his or her behalf. He knocked on suspects’ doors and took jittery witnesses out for meals—the little things that can produce major investigative breakthroughs over time, and also the little things that his colleagues wouldn’t do in order to wind up homicide investigations in many African-American neighborhoods. That tenacity paid off, and while some LA detectives were solving cases less than half the time, Skaggs tried to keep his clearance rate at 80 percent or higher. He dismissed detectives who couldn’t keep up as “40 percenters.”

No spoiler alert should be required here to note that Skaggs and his dogged team of partners and subordinates solve the case. It turns out that Bryant Tennelle’s killers mistook him for a rival gang member, even though he had no gang affiliations at all—he was simply wearing the wrong hat as the wrong group of people drove by. It’s a tragedy, but the grander tragedy driving Ghettoside—and the reason it’s not to be overlooked or treated as just another true-crime chronicle—is Leovy’s reminder that “where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic.” As a result of this malign neglect, “black America has not benefited from what Max Weber called a state monopoly on violence—the government’s exclusive right to exercise legitimate force,” she writes. “A monopoly provides citizens with legal autonomy, the liberating knowledge that the government will pursue anyone who violates their personal safety. But slavery, Jim Crow, and conditions across much of black America for generations after worked against the formation of such a monopoly. Since personal violence inevitably flares where the state’s monopoly is absent, this situation results in the deaths of thousands of Americans each year.”

In other words, America’s black-on-black crime problem isn’t going to be solved by black boys pulling up their pants or refraining from using the N-word or any of the other condescending solutions cable news pundits have eagerly urged upon the monolithic “black community” of their feverish imagining. Our justice system can prevent blacks killing blacks in the same way that it prevents whites killing whites: by investing time, money, and police resources into proving that black people are valuable to our society....Unfortunately, such a commitment is expensive and arduous, and it requires white Americans to admit that [it is necessary if we are to achieve a 'post-racial' society].

 

 

Cord Jefferson is a writer living in Los Angeles.

===============================================

Marching on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia

Photograph: Steven M. Falk/AP

The Verdict From Ferguson: Put Video Cameras on Cops

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

A St. Louis County, Mo., grand jury’s decision on Monday not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer in the nearby town of Ferguson who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black American, reignited national debate about race relations and law enforcement. It also underscored the wisdom of a relatively simple reform: putting video cameras on cops.

Brown’s parents, to their great credit, urged an alternative to looting stores and throwing rocks at the police. They called for peaceful protest and a sensible change in police procedure–namely, a move to equip street officers with tiny video cameras that would record interactions with citizens, including criminal suspects.
If Darren Wilson had worn such a camera, we might know whether Michael Brown was shot with his hands raised in an effort to surrender, as some witnesses recounted, or attacked Wilson, as prosecutors apparently concluded. The Police Foundation, a nonprofit research group, last year published the results of an impressive study showing that use of body-worn video cameras in one California city “was associated with dramatic reductions in use-of-force and complaints against officers.”
The study was overseen by Tony Farrar, the empirically-minded police chief of Rialto, Calif.—pop. 100,000—and Barak Ariel, a Ph.D. researcher affiliated with Cambridge University in the U.K. The year-long randomized, controlled trial was the first formal evaluation of video cameras worn by police on patrol, according to the foundation.

Half of Rialto’s officers on every shift were assigned wearable cameras that could be attached to their uniforms or sunglasses. ”The findings suggest more than a 50 percent reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force compared to control conditions,” according to the study. Moreover, Rialto citizens lodged about one-tenth the number of complaints about police conduct during the study period as they did during the prior 12 months.
Some police officers might reflexively resist video cameras. The way to overcome that resistance is to point out that if Ferguson’s Officer Wilson had worn one, his claim that he felt threatened could be reliably corroborated. Police conduct (or misconduct) is now frequently captured by cell phone video recorded by witnesses, who may or may not seek to memorialize events in an accurate way. If the police themselves do the recording systematically—as some departments already do with dashboard-mounted cameras in patrol cars—everyone would have a more complete version of disputed events.
Even better, the presence of cameras might deter the next Ferguson-style police shooting in the first place.
 

No Indictment of Officer in Ferguson Missouri Death

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.

===============================================

People march up Seventh Avenue in New York on Monday night to demonstrate against the decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown.Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times

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”.

=============================================

Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother, in front of the Ferguson police station after the grand jury’s decision on Monday. Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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.”

 

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,

Michael Brown Spent Last Weeks Grappling With Problems and Promise / Darren Wilson Was Low-Profile Officer With Unsettled Early Days

Brandon Lewis, right, says Michael Brown used his size to avoid confrontations.

N.Y. TIMES

Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar.

At the same time, he regularly flashed a broad smile that endeared those around him. He overcame early struggles in school to graduate on time. He was pointed toward a trade college and a career and, his parents hoped, toward a successful life.

N.Y. TIMES

Officer Wilson’s childhood home in St. Peters, Mo. He has kept out of view since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times        

The intense focus on Officer Darren Wilson’s actions marks a jarring change for a man who, over most of his 28 years, had left a muted, barely noticeable trail behind. While protesters have marched nightly, a grand jury has begun hearing evidence, and supporters of the officer have raised more than $350,000 for him. Officer Wilson himself has vanished from public view, leaving his ranch home where letters on red, white and blue stars hung from a door spell out “Welcome” in a town southwest of St. Louis; he is believed to be under police protection.

 

Officer Wilson, who is divorced, was born in Texas but has spent most of his years in these suburbs that surround St. Louis, records show. Family members, friends, colleagues and a lawyer have mostly refused to speak publicly about him, yet those who do paint a portrait of a well-mannered, relatively soft-spoken, even bland person who seemed, if anything, to seek out a low profile — perhaps, some suggested, a reaction to a turbulent youth in which his mother was repeatedly divorced, convicted of financial crimes and died of natural causes before he finished high school in 2004.

 

After attending the police academy, Officer Wilson began work in Jennings, another suburb, in June 2009. Robert Orr, the former chief of the Jennings Police Department, said he had no recollection of Officer Wilson and had to call the mayor last week to jog his memory. “Sure enough, the mayor said he was one of ours,” Mr. Orr said. “That must mean he never got in any trouble, because that’s when they usually came to me.”

Yet Officer Wilson’s formative experiences in policing came in a department that wrestled historically with issues of racial tension, mismanagement and turmoil. During Officer Wilson’s brief tenure, another officer was fired for a wrongful shooting, and a lieutenant was accused of stealing federal funds. In 2011, in the wake of federal and state investigations into the misuse of grant money, the department closed, and the city entered into a contract to be policed by the county. The department was found to have used grant money to pay overtime for D.W.I. checkpoints that never took place.

 

In October 2011, he went to Ferguson, where he now makes $45,302 a year.

There, Chief Thomas Jackson has reported no disciplinary actions against him. “He was a gentle, quiet man,” the chief said. “He was a distinguished officer.”

 

 

Shooting Accounts Differ as Holder Schedules Visit to Ferguson

F.B.I. agents went door to door looking for witnesses. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times        

N.Y.TIMES

As a county grand jury prepared to hear evidence on Wednesday in the shooting death of a black teenager by a white police officer that touched off 10 days of unrest here, witnesses have given investigators sharply conflicting accounts of the killing.

 

Some of the accounts seem to agree on how the fatal altercation initially unfolded: with a struggle between the officer, Darren Wilson, and the teenager, Michael Brown. Officer Wilson was inside his patrol car at the time, while Mr. Brown, who was unarmed, was leaning in through an open window.

Many witnesses also agreed on what happened next: Officer Wilson’s firearm went off inside the car, Mr. Brown ran away, the officer got out of his car and began firing toward Mr. Brown, and then Mr. Brown stopped, turned around and faced the officer.

 

But on the crucial moments that followed, the accounts differ sharply, officials say. Some witnesses say that Mr. Brown, 18, moved toward Officer Wilson, possibly in a threatening manner, when the officer shot him dead. But others say that Mr. Brown was not moving and may even have had his hands up when he was killed.

 

The new details on the witness accounts emerged as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was scheduled to visit Ferguson on Wednesday to meet with F.B.I. agents who have been conducting a civil rights investigation into the shooting.

 

Mr. Holder and top Justice Department officials were weighing whether to open a broader civil rights investigation to look at Ferguson’s police practices at large, according to law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks. The issue came up after news reports revealed a 2009 case in which a man said that four police officers beat him, then charged him with damaging government property — by getting blood on their uniforms.

Under Mr. Holder, the Justice Department has opened nearly two dozen such investigations into police departments, more than twice as many as were opened in the previous five years, according to department data.

 

Officer Darren Wilson at a meeting. Credit City of Ferguson, via Associated Press        

 

 The fatal confrontation began on Aug. 9 shortly after the police received reports that two men had robbed a convenience store in Ferguson. Officer Wilson, who was not responding to the robbery, had stopped to speak with Mr. Brown and a friend, Dorian Johnson. The Ferguson police chief, Thomas Jackson, said that it was around the time that Officer Wilson started talking to the two that he realized they fit the description of the suspects in the convenience store robbery.

A lawyer for Mr. Johnson said that his client was interviewed by the F.B.I. and the St. Louis County police last week for nearly four hours. In that interview, Mr. Johnson admitted that he and Mr. Brown had stolen cigarillos from the store, said the lawyer, Freeman R. Bosley Jr.

 

Mr. Bosley said that the officer told the two to get off the street, adding that Mr. Johnson told the officer that he lived nearby. They got into a bit of a verbal dispute with the officer about whether walking in the street constituted a crime, Mr. Bosley said.

 

Contrary to what several witnesses have told law enforcement officials, Mr. Bosley said that the officer then reached out of the window with his left hand and grabbed Mr. Brown by the throat.

He said Mr. Brown pushed him off, and the officer then grabbed Mr. Brown’s shirt.

“My client sees the officer pull a gun and hears him say, ‘I’ll shoot you’ — then ‘pow!’ there was a shot,” Mr. Bosley said, referring to the one that apparently went off in the car. “He did not describe a scuffle. It was more of a scuffle for him to get away.”

 

However, law enforcement officials say witnesses and forensic analysis have shown that Officer Wilson did sustain an injury during the struggle in the car.

As Officer Wilson got out of his car, the men were running away. The officer fired his weapon but did not hit anyone, according to law enforcement officials.

 

A man who lives nearby, Michael T. Brady, said in an interview that he saw the initial altercation in the patrol car, although he struggled to see exactly what was happening.

 

“It was something strange,” said Mr. Brady, 32, a janitor. “Something was not right. It was some kind of altercation. I can’t say whether he was punching the officer or whatever. But something was going on in that window, and it didn’t look right.”

 

Mr. Brady said he could see Mr. Johnson at the front passenger side of the car when he and Mr. Brown suddenly started running. Mr. Brady did not hear a gunshot or know what caused them to run. But he said he did see a police officer get out of the patrol car and start walking briskly while firing on Mr. Brown as he fled.

What happened next could be what the case turns on. Several witnesses have told investigators that Mr. Brown stopped and turned around with his arms up.

 

According to his account to the Ferguson police, Officer Wilson said that Mr. Brown had lowered his arms and moved toward him, law enforcement officials said. Fearing that the teenager was going to attack him, the officer decided to use deadly force. Some witnesses have backed up that account. Others, however — including Mr. Johnson — have said that Mr. Brown did not move toward the officer before the final shots were fired.

 

The F.B.I., Mr. Bosley said, pressed Mr. Johnson to say how high Mr. Brown’s hands were. Mr. Johnson said that his hands were not that high, and that one was lower than the other, because he appeared to be “favoring it,” the lawyer said.

James McKnight, who also said he saw the shooting, said that Mr. Brown’s hands were up right after he turned around to face the officer.

“I saw him stumble toward the officer, but not rush at him,” Mr. McKnight said in a brief interview. “The officer was about six or seven feet away from him.”

THE GUARDIAN

Darren Wilson, the 28-year-old police officer who killed an unarmed Ferguson teenager with a shot to the head, has so far said nothing publicly about the incident.
Wilson and his girlfriend, Barbara Spradling, left their home in Crestwood, a predominantly white neighbourhood some 18 miles from Ferguson, before he was named last week in connection with the shooting of Michael Brown.
But before they left, Spradling gave an account of the shooting to a friend, who says it is markedly different from the narrative espoused by Brown’s family and their supporters.

Spradling told the friend who spoke to the Guardian that Brown initiated the altercation by striking Wilson in the face, leading to a struggle for Wilson’s gun that resulted in one shot being fired in the police vehicle.
St Louis County police chief Jon Belmar said at a news conference on Sunday that when Wilson got out of his squad car, Brown pushed him back in, and a struggle ensued. Belmar said at least one shot was fired from the officer’s gun inside the police car. An officer with the St Louis County police, who declined to be named, told the Guardian that Brown sustained an injury to his thumb at this point; the autopsy released on Monday shows that one shot hit Brown’s hand.

Johnson has given several slightly differing accounts of the incident. A week ago he told MSNBC that as a squad car pulled up, Wilson called out at them to “get the fuck on the sidewalk”, before the car reversed back alongside them. Johnson claims the officer opened his door onto Brown, and the door bounced off him.
Johnson, in an account supported by other eyewitnesses, maintains that Wilson grabbed Brown through the window of his squad car. Johnson, in a disputed claim, said that Wilson fired a shot while still grabbing on to Brown.
What is not disputed is that Brown then made off. In his MSNBC interview, Johnson said Brown was shot in the back, at which point he turned around and put his hands up. “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting,” Brown said, according to Johnson. (Johnson’s assertion that Brown was shot in the back was not supported by the findings of the independent autopsy.)
But Spradling told the friend that Brown turned around after the officer called on him to stop. In Wilson’s version, Brown was not shot while surrendering, but while moving toward Wilson in a threatening manner. Brown reportedly continued to move toward Wilson even after being shot, and did not stop moving forward until suffering a mortal wound to the head.
“He just kept coming,” the friend said Wilson claimed.
In Wilson’s account, Brown never raised his hands to plead for his life, or said “don’t shoot”, but rather taunted Wilson before moving forward and being shot.