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In the News: “Show Me” Justice

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From the White House: President Obama Delivers a Statement on the Ferguson Grand Jury’s Decision

Transcript

PRESIDENT OBAMA: First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law.  And so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make.  There are Americans who agree with it, and there are Americans who are deeply disappointed, even angry.  It’s an understandable reaction.  But I join Michael’s parents in asking anyone who protests this decision to do so peacefully.  Let me repeat Michael’s father’s words:  “Hurting others or destroying property is not the answer.  No matter what the grand jury decides, I do not want my son’s death to be in vain.  I want it to lead to incredible change, positive change, change that makes the St. Louis region better for everyone.”  Michael Brown’s parents have lost more than anyone.  We should be honoring their wishes.   […]

Finally, we need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation.  The fact is, in too many parts of this country, a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color.  Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country.  And this is tragic, because nobody needs good policing more than poor communities with higher crime rates.  The good news is we know there are things we can do to help.  And I’ve instructed Attorney General Holder to work with cities across the country to help build better relations between communities and law enforcement. […]

Those of you who are watching tonight understand that there’s never an excuse for violence, particularly when there are a lot of people in goodwill out there who are willing to work on these issues.

On the other hand, those who are only interested in focusing on the violence and just want the problem to go away need to recognize that we do have work to do here, and we shouldn’t try to paper it over.  Whenever we do that, the anger may momentarily subside, but over time, it builds up and America isn’t everything that it could be.

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More …

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Holder: Federal Investigation Into Ferguson Shooting Still Ongoing

Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday that the federal investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown is still underway and remains independent of the local probe.

“Though we have shared information with local prosecutors during the course of our investigation, the federal inquiry has been independent of the local one from the start, and remains so now,” Holder said in a statement released after a state prosecutor in Missouri announced a gran jury had declined to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. “And although federal civil rights law imposes a high legal bar in these types of cases, we have resisted forming premature conclusions.”

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Legal Experts Explain Why The Ferguson Grand Jury Was Set Up For Failure

[T]wo experienced attorneys explain what, in their view, are serious flaws with the grand jury process in the Darren Wilson case. The lawyers, St. Louis University law professor Susan McGraugh and Jerryl T. Christmas, a defense attorney and former prosecutor in St. Louis, are unsparing in their criticism of county prosecutor Bob McCulloch. (Christmas has participated in protests following Brown’s death.)

Specifically, McGraugh and Christmas question McCulloch’s unusual decision to present “all evidence” to the grand jury. Typically, prosecutors present to the grand jury only the evidence necessary to establish probable cause. (A grand jury does not determine guilt or innocence but only if a reasonable jury could find the defendant guilty.) McGraugh and Christmas are especially critical of McCulloch’s decision to allow Wilson to testify for hours in front of the grand jury.

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Activists Play The Long Game

Activist and writer Ashley Yates has lived in the St. Louis area since she was 15 years old, so the fatal shooting of Michael Brown hit close to home literally and figuratively. A young black woman in her 20s, Yates plays an instrumental role in mobilizing people who were fed up the with status quo long before Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown on August 9, around the epidemic of police brutality and devaluation of black lives. But she’s not new to organizing and leadership. As a student at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Yates was the political chair of the Legion of Black Collegians and was actively involved in community work. Now, she’s using her previous experience and passion for social justice to call for a paradigm shift. […]

Yates co-founded Millennial Activists United (MAU), a grassroots organization, with Alexis Templeton and Brittany Ferrell, after the three recognized an absence of women’s voices among organizers. “The omission wasn’t intentional, just something that needed to be addressed,” she said. […]

But at the heart of this dynamic movement are youth who want both justice for victims like Brown and Myers and larger changes in the political and economic system. In conjunction with Thoughtworks, a software tech company, Kambale Musavuli relocated to Ferguson and helped to start Hands Up in August. Once there, he was floored by young people in the community.

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Editor’s Note: Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.


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/ 22 Comments

22 comments

  1. JanF

    Can we change a culture that makes a hero of a policeman who shoots and kills an unarmed man … and stands over his uncovered body for four and a half hours?

    We have to find a way.

  2. Diana in NoVa

    I feel sick. Sick that the long tradition of racist hatred in this country is still with us in the form of smug Caucasians who blame the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators of it.

    Thanks for this diary, Jan. At the moment the only solution I can think of is for 90 percent of young people of color to go to law school, mobilize their neighbors to help them get elected to state legislatures and Congress, and change the law.

    Oh, and reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine on TV, thereby decimating Faux Noise.

  3. DeniseVelez

    at how many times that asshole McCulloch mentioned his name – to make it sound like Holder/DOJ was part of the presser and decision.

  4. JanF

    Here are a few:


    @HunterDK: Maybe the delay is so Gov. Nixon can fly Rudy Giuliani out to explain grand jury decision in detail.

    @Kragar_LGF: The same people who have called for a half dozen Benghazi hearings will say the #Ferguson Grand Jury announcement settles things

    @jsmooth995

    The fundamental danger of a non-indictment is not more riots, it is more Darren Wilsons.

    @AngryBlackLady: Sick of hearing people telling the protestors to be peaceful. How about telling law enforcement to stop the violence? #Ferguson

  5. JanF

    Ferguson, goddamn: No indictment for Darren Wilson is no surprise. This is why we protest


    … all of the leaks and all of the tweets warning that there would be no indictment for Darren Wilson – that instead there would be black “violence” and a perpetual “state of emergency” – have served as constructed preparations to manage our disappointment, for the big reveal that our criminal justice system was still as broken as it ever was. And now that the grand jury’s decision has arrived in the form of a smirking white prosecutor, all of the agony of that wait has culminated in nothing more than the sum of our grim expectations, to ignite cynicism and an old rage.

    Today, Mike Brown is still dead, and Darren Wilson has not been indicted for his murder. And who among us can say anything but: “I am not surprised”?

    The author describes her personal journey and those of her students (at a community college in NYC) and the need to protest.

    Ferguson is indeed a microcosm – of the all the narratives about race and America that we fear and suppress. Still: it is not enough to say that, yes, of course the promise of justice – the promise of America, of democracy – has failed its black citizens, again. It doesn’t make the disappointment any less disappointing, nor the rage any less real. But it doesn’t make the moment any less mighty either.

    We can choose to say something else. We are choosing to protest.

    There are guidelines – for them and for us, for cops and for protesters – but there is no textbook when history unfolds in real time, and there are no rules for coping with a moment as mighty as this. There will be changes, and there is still a federal civil-rights investigation. Right now, though, there are only tears of rage, frustration and anger – or all three at once.

    Her conclusion:

    We protest so that some day, some years from now, justice is not a surprise, nor a dream, nor deferred. So that justice just is.

  6. JanF

    Dead Of Night: The Ferguson Decision

    There is something gone badly wrong in the way police are taught to look at civilians these days. This is the logic of an occupying power being employed on American citizens. Ever since 9/11, when we all began to be told that we were going to have to bend a little bit, and then a little bit more, to authority or else we’d all die, the police in this country have been militarized in their tactics and in their equipment, which is bad enough, but in their attitudes and their mentality, which is far, far worse. Suspicion has bled into weaponized paranoia, especially in the case of black and brown people, especially in the case of young men who are black or brown, but this is not About Race because nothing ever is About Race.

    Even the potential of a threat requires a deadly response, Dick Cheney’s one-percent idea brought to American cities and towns until Salt Lake City, of all places, winds up with cops who are deadlier on the streets than drug dealers. This is how you wind up with Darren Wilson. This is how you wind up with Michael Brown, dead in the middle of the road. This is how Darren Wilson walks, tonight, for the killing of Michael Brown. This is how you end up with an American horror story.

    On McCulloch:

    In the most high-profile case of his career, prosecutor Bob McCulloch insisted he was just a feather in the wind, just gathering evidence so the grand jury could make up its own mind, not directing it at all. And then, Monday night, he hummina-hummina’ed for seven full minutes before announcing the least shocking news of the day. Darren Wilson did not commit a crime by shooting Michael Brown dead in broad daylight in the middle of the street. But Bob McCulloch, public servant, knows what the real problem with this investigation was.

       “The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24-hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something, for anything to talk about, following closely behind with the non-stop rumors on social media.”

    Social media. He actually fking said that.

  7. JanF

    A Grave Injustice

    The authorities didn’t even want to have a grand jury in this case. When the threat of civil unrest compelled them to convene one, the prosecutor threw the case, blaming the 24-hour news cycle and social media for creating the expectation that justice might be done in the broad daylight murder of Michael Brown. After the prosecutor announced the grand jury’s decision, Michael Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden said, simply, “They still don’t care. They ain’t never gon’ care.” […]

    Despite glaring racial disparities in the attitude to this case, there are no shortage of white people who are disappointed, saddened, or outraged by the “legality” of Michael Brown’s murder. But they will never feel what it is like to have their children threatened and devalued like this. They won’t know the fear and uncertainty this causes even for our president, First Lady, and Attorney General, all of whom have children who could one day be guilty of walking down the middle of the street when a man in a patrol car rolls up and tells them to “get the f*ck on the sidewalk.” And then guns them down in cold blood, collects a half million dollars from racist fans, and walks off scot-free to an early retirement.

    Officer Darren Wilson should have been given the opportunity to defend his actions in a court of law. He could well have won an acquittal. But what’s clear is that the moment after he ended Michael Brown’s life, the system went into overdrive to protect him and to justify what he had done. They made sure that killing Michael Brown was not a crime. It wasn’t even maybe a crime. It was just what police officers do in America without having to worry that they might have to answer for it in court.

  8. JanF

    Justifying Homicide

    It would have been powerful to see charges filed against Darren Wilson. At the same time, actual justice for Michael Brown-a world in which young men like Michael Brown can’t be gunned down without consequences-won’t come from the criminal justice system. Our courts and juries aren’t impartial arbiters-they exist inside society, not outside of it-and they can only provide as much justice as society is willing to give.

    Unfortunately, we don’t live in a society that gives dignity and respect to people like Michael Brown and John Crawford and Rekia Boyd. Instead, we’ve organized our country to deny it wherever possible, through negative stereotypes of criminality, through segregation and neglect, and through the spectacle we see in Ferguson and the greater St. Louis area, where police are empowered to terrorize without consequence, and residents are condemned and attacked when they try to resist.

  9. janicket

    So now we’re learning that the grand jury made its decision by midday; yet the verdict wasn’t announced till well after dark, after hours of breathless media yammering about “How bad will the riots be?” and ratcheting emotions on both sides, building and building the tension till something HAD to snap.  

    We’re teased with the news that there’ll be a press conference about the verdict at 7:00 ET.  Then it’s not the verdict; it’s the governor coming out to blather on about how tense the whole situation is and everybody better be peaceful or else we’ll roll on you will all this firepower we’ve got waiting.

    More time passes; more frustrated anticipation (though we all knew in our hearts what it was going to be, didn’t we?) ramps up and up.

    Then, finally, the prosecutor comes out with his coldly dismissive speech, beginning with an attack on the media before launching into his defense of letting Wilson walk.  Out on the streets, the vast militarized brigades of law enforcement roll into position, tear gas and armored vehicles and such straining at the leash.  And predictably, Ferguson blows sky-high.

    Wow!  Tear gas clouds and running menacing figures and burning buildings and cars!  Breathless media reports from the front lines!  It’s true!  They ARE all thugs!  Just look at Those People running wild!  Animals!  That kid got just what he deserved!

    Does anyone else wonder just why the announcement was handled so badly?  Just whose interests are served by the propaganda value of the images out of Ferguson last night?

    Or am I just being paranoid?  I report; you decide.

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