Vince Warren, the Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights Can you explain the grand jury decision? It is almost inexplicable. The first thing we have to remember is that this is not a verdict. This hasn’t gotten to verdict. This was an indictment. So the grand jury was asked to consider evidence in order to prefer charges so that the police officer could go to trial, but they did not do that. What was so strange about it is I’ve never seen, in my years, I’ve never seen a prosecutor take such a hands-off approach. And to listen to that press conference, Amy, you would think that he had just sort of spread out the pieces of paper on the table and said, grand jury, do your thing. Let me tell you, prosecutors never do that. There’s a reason why they say prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich. It’s because they can entirely control that process. Now, they did release some of the transcripts yesterday. And I took a look at some of them, and what I saw, which people need to know, is that this wasn’t just the grand jurors listening to the testimony I idly. The prosecutors are framing the evidence. And as you heard in that press conference yesterday, there was more talk about what Mike Brown did than there was about what Darren Wilson did. It was almost as if in that grand jury process looking to charge Darren Wilson, that they were really charging Mike Brown. And I also noticed in some of the transcripts that they were setting up — the prosecutors were setting up the sense of fear, even asking the Police Sergeant when he got to Mike Brown’s body, when he first got there, leading them into the testimony to say, yeah, there were people that were agitated, there were people that were upset, there were people that were moving around. And of course there were people that were agitated because Mike Brown’s body was on the ground. But they’re setting this up so that essentially to play into the defense of Darren Wilson, that he acted reasonably out of fear for his life, A, B, that he acted reasonably and pursuant to the law because he thought that Mike Brown was breaking the law. So what we have is a grand jury system that for most people in the world seems to play out like it was, gosh, what can we do, the evidence was really overwhelming. But I don’t think the evidence was. You only have one set of that story. Unfortunately, in this process, Mike Brown’s side of the story never gets told. What we do know is the prosecutors were setting this up so that it was in the best light, in my view, it was, from what I’ve seen, in the best light for the police officer and his reasonable belief that his life was in danger, so that is why he shot. I don’t think we can take away anything from this decision not to indict other than that it is now officially open season on black folks when it comes to police violence. That feeling that most of us had yesterday when we were listening to the decision, that feeling in your stomach, that unsettling feeling like there’s nothing we can do — that is what injustice feels like. democracynow.org/2014/11/25/it_is_officially_open_season_on
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 03:11:27 +0000
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