Tonight's announcement that a grand jury in St. Louis County, Missouri had decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the August 9 shooting death of unarmed teen Michael Brown should come as no surprise. St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch has a long history of siding with the police, his life shaped by when his own father, a St. Louis police officer, was shot and killed by a black man when McCulloch was 12 years old. He was fundamentally incapable of impartially handling the Michael Brown shooting case, and clearly steered the grand jury towards not indicting.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Don Von Natta Jr. said, "I covered criminal justice for 12 years. Never saw anything like this no-indict statement: a mix of confusion, defiance and condescension." According to Newsweek, even before the non-indictment was announced, Ferguson's black community had been "bracing for McCulloch to let the officer who shot Brown go free."
"'I don't believe that Bob McCulloch's office is going to issue any charges,' said Jerryl Christmas, a local criminal defense lawyer (in late August). 'It's not going to happen.' The investigating grand jury, Christmas said, is the perfect tool for allowing McCulloch to bail out the officer without getting blamed for dumping the case."
#ferguson #policebrutality #justiceformikebrown
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