Showing posts with label ferguson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ferguson. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Troll Chuck C. Johnson Banned from Twitter for Threatening Ferguson Activist

 
 

Right Wing troublemaker and troll-supreme Chuck C. Johnson has been banned from his main account for offering money to "take out" Ferguson civil rights activist DeRay McKesson.



From Politico
Johnson was suspended on Sunday after soliciting support to “take out” DeRay McKesson, a civil rights activist. Johnson and his lawyers argue that he is a victim of censorship, and have threatened legal action. “Twitter doesn’t seem to have a problem with people using their service to coordinate riots,” Johnson wrote on his blog Sunday. “But they do have a problem with the kind of journalism I do.”
A self-described "radical” and “revolutionary," Johnson is known for ginning up controversy with false accusations. He wrongly accused two New York Times reporters of revealing the address of the police officer in the Ferguson shooting. He wrongly accused another Times reporter of posing for Playgirl. He wrongly claimed that Sen. Cory Booker did not live in Newark when he served as that city’s mayor. On one occasion, he was temporarily suspended from Twitter after posting photos of someone he claimed had been exposed to Ebola. His most high-profile moment came when he rightly cast doubt on the Rolling Stone article about the University of Virginia rape accusations. Then he threatened to expose the student who made the accusations, attacked her on social media and published a photo of a woman he thought was her -- but wasn't. Johnson has also suggested that President Obama is gay.

photo 1b7dbf9f-3719-4d0a-90a5-f1eb17ce42cf.png



Twitter also took the threat seriously and banned Johnson's account, but he is such a rabid troll that he had to push back, of course.

From GotNews: "Suspended from Twitter for Journalism"
I am an award-winning journalist who has exposed frauds, ended careers, and been profiled in major publications. And now I’m trending on Twitter while my account, @chuckcjohnson, is suspended on Twitter.
Last night I tweeted that I was interested in doing some research on the twitter user, @deray a.k.a. DeRay McKesson.
@Deray is a leader of the anti-cop astroturfing currently hitting the inner city black community.
I’ve already exposed the activist, @ShaunKing, for being a fraud and potentially stealing some money from Tamir Rice. And I’ve been working with the ATF to bring justice to Michael Brown’s pastor who burned down his own church. I sued on my own dime to get Michael Brown’s juvenile records (which we are appealing to the Missouri Supreme Court.)
Of course I knew this would happen. Twitter has a serious problem with investigative journalism that breaks the mold.

Yeah, "award-winning journalist" who likes to threaten people. Otherwise known as a troll-bully.

Wonkette recently referred to Johnson as "Award-Winning Journalist and walking underpants stain Chuck C. Johnson."

Some may remember Chuck C. Johnson for his meddling and rabble-rousing during the Mississippi GOP Senate Primary last year, as he accused incumbent Republican Senator Thad Cochran of bribing black people to vote for him. Johnson was trying to help far-right Tea Partier Chris McDaniel, who lost to Cochran but refused to concede for weeks, spurred on by trolls like Johnson.

From Talking Points Memo
...It was the latest twist in the rancorous, messy feud enveloping the Mississippi GOP — and Johnson was right in the middle of it. He followed up the story, which was published on his own website, gotnews, with an avalanche of defiant tweets.
"You establishment hacks do know that I've been threatened with lawsuits, death threats before, right?" he wrote in one. "I planned on this."
He took on former Mitt Romney strategist Stuart Stevens, now a Cochran adviser, who mocked the bribery allegations and referred to Johnson as a "fringe" blogger. Johnson said Stevens had "praised" him in the past and threatened to publish private direct messages between the two.
All the while, Johnson engaged in relentless self-promotion. He bragged that his story had been picked up by the likes of Fox News, Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh (although he lamented that Sean Hannity didn't cite him by name.)

Chuck C. Johnson is not to be confused with Charles Johnson of the democratic blog Little Green Footballs, and indeed the two men have become online sparring partners thanks to their similar names and opposite aims. Now Johnson is accusing the other Johnson of getting him banned from Twitter:

From Charles Johnson on Little Green Footballs
...here’s the real kicker: Chuck seems to think I control Twitter now.
“It’s probably that loser over at Little Green Footballs,” Johnson said. “The guy has been stalking me for months for having the same name. It’s sad that Twitter has joined the censorship campaign but unsurprising. I’ve been fighting censors since I edited the high school newspaper. I’ve never lost. I’ll win this fight, too.”
I hope he doesn’t shoot me.






Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Baltimore Burning Over Death of Freddie Gray

photo BaltimoreRiots.png

Here we go again. On April 19, 2015, a group of policemen in Baltimore, Maryland, took custody of a man named Freddie Gray and after he was injured during the scuffle, they dragged him to an ambulance where later he died a mysterious death. Somehow he was killed inside an ambulance, completely severing his spinal cord. You cannot make up a horror story worse than the plight of African Americans in the hands of white cops these days.

From The Atlantic: The Mysterious Death of Freddie Gray
According to the city, an officer made eye contact with Gray, and he took off running, so they pursued him. Though he'd had scrapes with the law before, there's no indication he was wanted at the time. And though he was found with a switchblade, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said, “We know that having a knife is not necessarily a crime.”

The police say Gray didn't resist arrest and that officers didn't use force, which seems to be mostly corroborated by video shot by bystanders. Gray seems to shout in pain, and his leg seems injured as officers drag him to a police van. (Someone off camera shouts, "His leg broke and y'all dragging him like that!") Gray also had asthma and requested his inhaler, but didn't get it. Yet it's not the leg or the asthma that killed him. Instead, it was a grave injury to his spinal cord. Gray's family said he was treated for three fractured vertebrae and a crushed voice box, the sorts of injuries that doctors say are usually caused by serious car accidents. The van made at least two stops before reaching the police station, but there's no footage to say what happened during the journey or at those stops.

It's a baffling conundrum. "None of the officers describe any use of force," Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said. "None of the officers describe using any force against Mr. Gray." And yet somehow Gray was fatally hurt while in police custody.

Baffling conundrum, indeed.

So what has happened since Gray's death? Protest marches have sometimes turned into riots, with looting and fires, and the Governor called in the National Guard. Hashtag Baltimore is turning into another Ferguson, Missouri. Or maybe EVERYWHERE is Ferguson these days, and the country has got to get this under control! The good news is that recently sworn-in Attorney General Loretta Lynch has already sent a team to Baltimore to investigate the circumstances. Which is fine, but at some point there has to be justice for black Americans who are scared for their lives and for their children.















































Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, April 9, 2015

The Murder of Walter Scott in Charleston SC



Walter Scott was murdered by police officer Michael Slager in Charleston, South Carolina. Like so many sad killings we've had this year, this is another white cop shooting a black man.

And he might have gotten away with it "Scott Free" if not for one brave soul, a young man named Feidin Santana, originally from the Dominican Republic, who stood filming with his camera while the policeman first tazed Scott on the ground, then shot him multiple times in the back as he fled.

In an interview Santana said he had considered deleting the video, fearful for his own life, then he decided to take it to the police. But when he got there and the police told him to wait while he went to get more officers, he got nervous and left to find a lawyer. After that, the video was released to the family and the media.

There are gruesome details gleaned from the video - the original police report said that CPR was given to Scott after the shooting, but the video showed none given by Slager or the assisting officer who arrives moments later. The taser was moved by Slager from where it was originally used and then thrown down beside the body, probably to justify the shooting. And the worst - Slager put handcuffs on Scott as he lay on the ground, probably after he died. Why do cops do that? I call that abuse of a dead body!

(Note: Cops in St. Louis also put cuffs on the dead body of Kajieme Powell.)

The only good thing out of this is that local Charleston officials immediately arrested Slager, then fired him. His own lawyer quit in the middle of the day. Good and good. Then tonight, the website GoFundMe shut down Slager's defense fund. Good for them too!

From the New York Times
The shooting unfolded after Officer Slager stopped the driver of a Mercedes-Benz with a broken taillight, according to police reports. Mr. Scott ran away, and Officer Slager chased him into a grassy lot that abuts a muffler shop. He fired his Taser, an electronic stun gun, but it did not stop Mr. Scott, according to police reports.

Moments after the struggle, Officer Slager reported on his radio: “Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser,” according to police reports.

But the video, which was taken by a bystander and provided to The New York Times by the Scott family’s lawyer, presents a different account. The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his Taser. Wires, which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending from Mr. Scott’s body as the two men tussle and Mr. Scott turns to run.

Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men, and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.

The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott’s body, the video shows.




















Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Ferguson Witness 40 is a Lying Racist - and McCulloch Knew It

photo B5CNdfwIQAAhx2b.jpg

Previous Related Post:
The Travesty of Witness 40 in the Ferguson Case

More stuff is coming out daily about Witness 40, who in spite of a dubious story and no proof she was even there, was allowed to testify to the Ferguson Grand Jury in the shooting death of Michael Brown. Smoking Gun reveals that Witness 40's real name is Sandra McElroy, and they rightly refer to her as a "fabulist" whose testimony was illegal perjury. She has untreated bipolar syndrome and lives in an alternate reality of her own making.



From Smoking Gun
Though prosecutors have sought to cloak the identity of grand jury witnesses, a TSG investigation has identified McElroy as “Witness 40.” A careful analysis of information contained in the unredacted portions of “Witness 40”’s grand jury testimony helped reporters identify McElroy and then conclusively match up details of her life with those of “Witness 40.”
TSG examined criminal, civil, matrimonial, and bankruptcy court records, as well as online postings and comments to unmask McElroy as “Witness 40,” the fabulist whose grand jury testimony and law enforcement interviews are deserving of multi-count perjury indictments.
. . . When asked what she was doing in Ferguson--which is about 30 miles north of her home--McElroy explained that she was planning to “pop in” on a former high school classmate she had not seen in 26 years. Saddled with an incorrect address and no cell phone, McElroy claimed that she pulled over to smoke a cigarette and seek directions from a black man standing under a tree. In short order, the violent confrontation between Brown and Wilson purportedly played out in front of McElroy.
Despite an abundance of red flags, state prosecutors put McElroy in front of the Ferguson grand jury the day after her meeting with the federal officials. After the 12-member panel listened to a tape of her interview conducted at the FBI office, McElroy appeared and, under oath, regaled the jurors with her eyewitness claims.

Not only is she lying about her whereabouts that day, but she had fabricated a story years earlier in order to cast doubt on a police matter, and Prosecutor Bob McCulloch must have know that. She got involved in the kidnapping of a boy named Shawn Hornbeck. So she was known by police and prosecutors to be a known liar way before the murder of Mike Brown. She should never have been allowed near a Grand Jury.
. . . (Ms. McElroy) fabricated a bizarre story in the wake of the rescue of Shawn Hornbeck, a St. Louis boy who had been held captive for more than four years by Michael Devlin, a resident of Kirkwood, a city just outside St. Louis.
McElroy, who also lived in Kirkwood, told KMOV-TV that she had known Devlin (seen at left) for 20 years. She also claimed to have gone to the police months after the child’s October 2002 disappearance to report that she had seen Devlin with Hornbeck. The police, McElroy said, checked out her tip and determined that the boy with Devlin was not Hornbeck.
In the face of McElroy’s allegations, the Kirkwood Police Department fired back at her. Cops reported that they investigated her claim and determined that “we have no record of any contact with Mrs. McElroy in regards to Shawn Hornbeck.” The police statement concluded, “We have found that this story is a complete fabrication.”


She's also a blinkin' racist, and her claim that she was trying to stop using the N-word is a lie. Smoking Gun's reporting continues with this analysis of her YouTube page:

An examination of McElroy’s YouTube page, which she apparently shares with one of her daughters, reveals other evidence of racial animus. Next to a clip about the disappearance of a white woman who had a baby with a black man is the comment, “see what happens when you bed down with a monkey have ape babies and party with them.” A clip about the sentencing of two black women for murder is captioned, “put them monkeys in a cage.”
McElroy’s YouTube page is also filled with a variety of anti-Barack Obama videos, including a clip purporting to show Michelle Obama admitting that the president was born in Kenya. Over the past year, McElroy has subscribed to three channels devoted to mystery and real crime shows, as well as a “We Are Darren Wilson” video channel.












Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Shades of Selma ~ A New Generation Marches for Justice

photo bac40254-d5fa-4aa6-a2aa-dcb02429fa44.jpg

The Eyes of Eric Garner During New York Protest

On Saturday December 13, 2014, there was a March for Justice in Washington DC, and another in New York City, that drew thousands to the streets, while millions watched on TV and computers worldwide. And the marching will continue all over the country because there needs to be Justice for Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin - the list is apparently endless. Society has to change. The Police need to police themselves. The scales of justice have to balance again so our country can survive.




















Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

The Travesty of Witness 40 in the Ferguson Case

photo c9c74e9f-954f-48dd-9f61-c9a226d665b0.jpg

One witness allowed to testify to the Ferguson Grand Jury on the death of Mike Brown was a self-avowed racist who had raised money to help shooter Darren Wilson. She also seems to have fabricated a "journal" in which she describes Mike Brown as "running at the cop like a football player, head down." But there's a problem - she can't prove she was even there that day, and the FBI can't find video of her car anywhere near Florissant Avenue that day.

Also, she testified that she was there after waking up that morning and deciding to "cure" her habit of saying the "N-Word" by driving through the black part of town.

Is that believable? I don't think so. No one thinks so.

Yet Bob McCulloch, the Ferguson Prosecutor, allowed her crazy-ass, obviously false testimony into the record, and even showed the Grand Jury a nutty interview she did with FBI agents in which she can't remember much and admits to being racist anyway. Then McCulloch didn't bother to question the reality of her statements, or give the jurors any sense of direction. It was admitted as if it was all factual.

This witness should be investigated and charged with perjury, or at the least needs some type of psychological intervention.

McCulloch should be disbarred and a Federal Prosecutor should cut through this crap immediately - not next week, not next month. This is a travesty of justice.

Of course, the Fox Racist News is running with Witness 40 as "proof" that Darren Wilson was in fear of his life from "linebacker" Mike Brown. Sean Hannity is using that line as often as possible - he loved George Zimmerman who killed unarmed Trayvon Martin, and now he loves Darren Wilson who shot down unarmed Mike Brown in the street. See a pattern there? Oh, but not racist, right?


Witness 40 Journal Entry Here


The FBI warned this person not to lie, but she then told them a completely garbled story, and she's probably lying about not having cable TV too. And probably everything else!
FBI Interview Transcript Here
We have to let you know that, we tell this
to everybody, if you lie to a federal agent, and
you, (inaudible) it is a crime. You are better off
not saying a word and just not talking to us if you
plan on lying and sitting in here and telling us
lies.

. . .

Transcript Via CascadianX1 on Gawker

August 9th - Saturday

8AM

Well Im gonna take my random drive to Alousant (sp. Florissant). Need to understand the Black was better so I stop calling Blacks N*****s and start calling them People. Like dad always said you cant fear an hate an entire race cause of what one man did 40 yrs ago.

4PM

OMFG it was crazy I dont even know where I was I ask Q.T. guy for directions but went wrong way. I just wanted to take drive. I ended up in Some Apartment Complex & asked directions again. Real nice kid in wife beater he had no idea he asked guy in green Shirt & Jeans that guy was realy sweet. Then I heard a weird noise caught my attention this cop was backing up saying [?]

I couldnt hear but they was some kids I almost hit with car. A big one & a skinny one. The Cop tried getting out & the big one hit the door the cop looked pissed & tryed opening door again. The big kid hit the door with his gut & the little one punched the mirror someth gold fell on the ground. The big one is half in the window/door cant Remember. I swear the little one had the cops leg. I heard a noise not sure what the guy in the green shirt was yelling stop the big kid pulled his pants up they was tan shorts & he started running the skinny one took off on opp direct the cop got out left hand on face right hand on gun. The cop scream but I could not understand . Every one was screaming. I heard 'lay yo stupid ass down' I think it was a lady next to me. The cop was wobbling the big kid turned around had his arms out with attitude. The cop just stood there dang if that kid didnt start running right at the cop like a football player head down. I heard 3 bangs but the big kid wouldn't stop. I heard cop say something but not sure what or if he was just making noise. Cop took a couple steps forward then backwards and the gun went off 2 more times. The last one the top of the kids head. OMG the blood. The green shirt man grabbed my arm and said get your ass out of here. I got in car & drove into into neighborhood some how[?] I went through parking lot across the street & back to Main Rd. Not sure how long but police were every place with Police tape. There was other cops there I seen one pull his gun but he didnt fire. Dont even remember when he got there. There was lady in parking lot of QT I just pulled up and asked for the close highway. She points & I left. Then to top shit off I got on highway going the wrong way. Had to ask for direct again. Real nice old man helped me out. Home has no cable so not sure whats on news.

9PM

Talked to [REDACTED] without telling him everything. He told me 1st I was nuts to taking drive up there and 2nd keep my mouth shut. He's prols right noone will believe me anyway.














Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Protests Continue over Killer Cops

photo cd5951e6-8152-4bd3-b52e-574930b726aa.png

Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho,
These Killer Cops
Have Got to Go"
~ Chant During Washington D.C. Die-In
Screencap Via Reuters Video

Protests are continuing night after night over the Eric Garner decision in New York, as well as the cumulative numbers of police shootings that continue each day.






New Video Shows a Lack of Medical Response
And NO CPR
For Eric Garner
According to CBS News, Two EMTs were Suspended



People are Blaming Everyone EXCEPT the Cops
























Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Joe Scarborough Goes Nuts Over Cop Shootings

photo 562c2c58-0e3a-423d-9768-d993dd1f10cb.jpg

Previous Related Posts:
Fake Prayer and Guns: Racism and the White Descendents of Harper Lee's Bob Ewell
Angry Nation Ponders Eric Garner Decision
Rudy Giuliani Blames Black People for Ferguson
Ferguson Grand Jury Part Three: Misled by Prosecutors

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Right Wing Nut Jobs can't wait to white-splain and justify the murders of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and Eric Garner in New York City.

Morning Joe has been on a rampage this week. I wonder when Scarborough will figure out that the racist vitriol he spews is probably one of the reasons his show is tanking in the ratings along with all the shows on MSNBC.



#FireJoe is trending every day. But Joe can't stop himself.

From Yahoo News
"If you're a black cop and you see me walking down the street, and you see an 18-year-old black guy walking down the street in the south Bronx, and you're told to stop and frisk, your job is to stop crime based on data," Scarborough said, "What do you do as a black cop? Do you go, 'I'm going to go across the street and frisk the white dude who looks like he lives in Connecticut?'"
. . . “A cop is not out on the street going, ‘You know what I’m going to do today? I’m going to move our society forward,’” Scarborough screamed. “A cop on the street has one job: to protect the people in that neighborhood. It is not to make a statement that makes prime-time people on MSNBC feel better about America.”

And he really hates that whole "hands up, don't shoot" protest thing:

The St. Louis Rams think it's cool to suggest St. Louis cops shoot young black men with their hands up in the air when we know that was a lie?" Scarborough asked. "It's a lie.

Chris Hayes of All In, also on MSNBC, disputed that it is a "lie."





From Mediaite
“Someone needs to tell me why Michael Brown has been chosen as the face of black oppression,” Scarborough said, arguing the left’s martyrdom of Brown mirrored the right’s lionization of George Zimmerman.
“There are so many great people to embrace as heroes in the black community, that deciding you’re going to embrace a guy who knocked over a convenience store and then according to a Grand Jury testimony acted in ways that would get my children shot? …That’s your hero? That’s the reason you want to burn down black businesses?…Really? This is your mission in life?”

Which led Lisa Bloom to retort:






As if all that wasn't enough, Scarborough went off on Tamir Rice, the child who had a toy - yes a toy - gun, and police shot him down without even investigating. Morning Joe says it wasn't a toy after all. Wow, for a man obsessed with the "lies" of the Left about Mike Brown, he doesn't much care about spreading Right Wing lies about Tamir Rice.

From PoliticusUSA
Scarborough: There’s another story in Cleveland where a young boy was shot dead. Police officers got a 911 call he was waving a gun scaring the blank out of everybody in this public park. Police officers came up and shot the young boy. He was 12 years old. They had taken off the markings to make it look like a toy gun. It was an actual gun. Do you know what The New York Times put in the caption of the video? ‘Police officers shoot child with toy.’ I don’t know exactly who puts those, attaches those, we are doing such a grave disservice to police officers in this country...

It really was a toy, Joe. A. Toy.

























Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Angry Nation Ponders Eric Garner Non-Verdict from New York Grand Jury

photo da8dcf59-c809-45b9-93c0-338d8ce6eb6d.gif

#ICantBreathe = Last words of Eric Garner.

What is your life? It is even a vapor,
that appears for a little time, and then vanishes away.
New Testament James 4:14

There are really no words - or breath left to speak words - after the non-decision of a New York Grand Jury in the tragic death of Eric Garner, who was killed by a cop while in a stranglehold on a public sidewalk. The whole thing was caught on film from the first interaction to his dying breath, yet to the bafflement of the world, no indictment against the cop was brought by the Grand Jury. Once again a prosecutor chose to protect law enforcement instead of enforcing the law.

And it's been another sad day for our country as we grieve another senseless death at the hands of the police, the death of a man who was selling cigarettes on the city streets. He wasn't a thug, he wasn't being violent. There was no danger for the cop who killed him. There is no instant death sentence for resisting arrest.

We have to solve this, and soon.

Eric Holder has announced an investigation into the Garner case, as well as in Ferguson for the victim Mike Brown. Until there is some kind of justice and cops are held accountable by somebody somewhere, protests are going to fill the streets of our country. Tonight thousands flooded into the streets from New York to Seattle, and Reverend Al Sharpton has called for a march on Washington on December 13th. It would be nice to have some sense of resolution of all these racially motivated cop shootings by Christmas, but the thin blue line is into protecting itself these days and most politicians don't seem to give a damn.



































Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, December 1, 2014

Darren Wilson Resigns from Ferguson Police

photo 3c377f1a-9ed4-4c0e-96eb-b1d5efcdbf93.jpg

Darren Wilson has resigned from the Ferguson Police Department.

I, Darren Wilson, hereby resign my commission as a police officer with the City of Ferguson effective immediately. I have been told that my continues employment may put the residents and police officers of the City of Ferguson at risk, which is a circumstance that I cannot allow. For obvious reasons, I wanted to wait until the grand jury made their decision before I officially made my decision to resign. It was my hope to continue in police work, but the safety of other police officers and the community are of the paramount importance to me. It is my hope that my resignation will allow the community to heal. I would like to thank all of my supporters and fellow officers throughout this process.
Source: KSDK

About the threats to other policemen:

Via AP
His lawyer, Neil Bruntrager, told The Associated Press that Wilson decided to step aside after police Chief Tom Jackson told him about the alleged threats on Saturday.
"The information we had was that there would be actions targeting the Ferguson (police) department or buildings in Ferguson related to the police department," Bruntrager said. He said Wilson, who had worked for the department for less than three years, and the city were already discussing an exit strategy, acknowledging that Wilson staying on as an officer there would be impossible.

From St. Louis Today
“As far as the city of Ferguson is concerned we have now severed ties with Officer Darren Wilson,” the mayor (James Knowles) said at a news conference Sunday. “It is important for us to talk about issues directly related to the city of Ferguson and what issues we can directly address as a city moving forward to bring our community together.”
(Mayor) Knowles said Wilson informed Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson of the resignation by telephone. A formal resignation letter was delivered to the city attorney Saturday night, several hours after Wilson’s lawyers released its contents to the news media.
. . . Jackson, who accompanied Knowles at the news conference, reiterated that he will not resign.
The mayor said the city did not give Wilson a deadline to resign. Nor, he added, did the city ask for or pressure Wilson to leave the department.


















Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Ferguson Grand Jury Decision Part Three: The Grand Jury Misled by Prosecutors

photo 4ce8aa42-4cc4-42b3-885b-be2b3fd575e2.jpg

Previous Related Posts:
Ferguson Grand Jury Decision Part Two: Darren Wilson's Weird Testimony
Ferguson Grand Jury Decision Part One - No Indictment, but Blame the Victim and Social Media
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Grand Jury in Ferguson was not only misled by strange testimony from Officer Darren Wilson about the "demon" Mike Brown, but was also misled several ways by Prosecutor Bob McCulloch. While at first we thought McCulloch's main sin was his hands-off approach to steering the Grand Jury one way or another, he may have actually broken the law by giving the jury illegal instructions. And I'm sure there is more to come about how corrupt this process was, not only for Missouri, but for the country as a whole.

Full (and bizarre) Statement from Prosecutor Bob McCulloch in Ferguson, MO.




Ferguson reminds us that we still have a race problem in America. But the face of this problem is not Darren Wilson’s. It’s Bob McCulloch’s.
. . . McCulloch short-circuited the process — reinforcing a sense among African Americans, and many others, that the justice system is rigged. He almost certainly could have secured an indictment on a lesser charge simply by requesting it, yet he acted as if he were a spectator, saying that jurors decided not to return a “true bill” on each possible charge — as if this were a typical outcome.~
~ Dana Milbank on Washington Post

The St. Louis County prosecutors were trying to be clever, repurposing an ancient institution for the contemporary political situation. They seemed to think that, because the grand jury members are drawn from the public, they would create public validation for whatever outcome the grand jury reached.
Yet public validation of ordinary jury trials depends on the public having heard the evidence. The Constitution provides that criminal trials be held publicly, precisely so that the citizenry knows what's going on. Grand jury proceedings are held in secret. That must've appealed to St. Louis County prosecutors, who sought to avoid a media circus. But releasing a summary of the grand jury transcripts afterward is a far cry from a public trial. Secret evidence was unlikely to produce public validation -- as, in fact, it did not.
~ Noah Feldman on Bloomberg

From Think Progress:
Justice Antonin Scalia, in the 1992 Supreme Court case of United States v. Williams, explained what the role of a grand jury has been for hundreds of years.
It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.
This passage was first highlighted by attorney Ian Samuel, a former clerk to Justice Scalia.
In contrast, McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours before the grand jury and presented them with every scrap of exculpatory evidence available.

Bob McCulloch had no answers - the "Fix was In."



According to Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC, Jurors were given copies of a 1979 Statute concerning when it is lawful for a cop to shoot a fleeing suspect. The problem is that the law was ruled unconstitutional in the 1980s, so . . . that's a huge problem. How could Bob McCulloch NOT know that the law was unconstitutional?

Via RawStory
O’Donnell said that early on in the jurors’ deliberations, Alizadeh handed them a copy of a 1979 Missouri statute saying police were “justified in the use of such physical force as he or she reasonably believes is immediately necessary to effect the arrest or prevent the escape from custody.” However, he explained, the Supreme Court found those kinds of statutes to be unconstitutional six years later.
As the Daily Kos reported, the high court found in Tennessee v. Garner that “where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force.”
. . . handing the jurors the original statute, O’Donnell said, ...conveyed the message that Wilson did not feel his life needed to be in danger for him to be legally justified in shooting and killing 18-year-old Michael Brown on Aug. 9.





~~~~~~~~~~~~









Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)