Justice Dept. to Recommend No Civil Rights Charges in Ferguson Shooting

Who is trying to spin what now? I certainly wasn't arguing that DOJ deciding to drop the matter is meaningless. I was pointing out your false equivalency between DOJ's decision and the fairness of the grand jury. Assuming the mere presence of a federal investigation should result in an indictment is an incredibly scary attitude. Plenty of investigations go nowhere, especially in trying to prove civil rights violations where the burden on the government in showing the state-of-mind of the officers is incredibly high. DOJ's decision should be viewed independently of the grand jury decision and neither should affirm or negate the other. You have two significantly different sets of facts you must prove between a civil rights charge on one hand and an unlawful homicide on the other.

Also this wasn't a joint investigation. Concurrent? Yes. Was there some information sharing? Yes. But there was never a joint investigation established.

 

NSFW if you don't want to see someone get shot and killed.

Oklahoma cop's body cam records him shooting and killing a man. Gets tense till back-up arrives, then they pull the gun from the dead man's pocket.

 

Merle Haggard weeps

 

That's some video and a heck of a shot by the cop while on the run with a handgun. I have a feeling that
everyone calling for all cops to be equipped with body cams is going to regret it fairly soon.

 

Oops - DOJ is apparently issuing a report soon saying the Ferguson PD has routinely shown racism and discrimination:

Ferguson Shooting: Federal Investigation Expected to Show Pattern of Discrimination at Police Department - ABC News

And:

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division found multiple examples of police and municipal court officials exhibiting racial bias in emails sent on official Ferguson accounts.

Examples include a November 2008 email which stated that President Barack Obama would not be president for very long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.” Another racist email from May 2011 stated: “An African-American woman in New Orleans was admitted into the hospital for a pregnancy termination. Two weeks later she received check for $5,000. She phoned the hospital to ask who it was from. The hospital said, ‘Crimestoppers.’”

 

I guess The Ferguson Police were required to use official accounts as opposed to our former Secretary of State who used her private e-mail account to
conduct government business.

 

I'm honestly torn as to which behavior is more hopelessly arrogant.

 

Arrogance has always been part of their playbook. Right down to having story released today on a day when focus is on the visit of BiBi
to Congress.

 

How was it released? The Times reported it. Had they held it for another day, we'd be hearing about how they're trying to keep secrets from everyone.

Either way, dumb thing she allegedly did. Still will vote for her over the guy whose party sends soldiers to die for mythical WMDs and wants to reward CEOs who lay people off with a tax cut.

 

I would use the "Everybody does it" defense if I didn't hate that excuse so much. So I got nothing.

 

It's worth noting that the report also exonerates Wilson.

It doesn't just say that they couldn't prosecute him do to the difficulties in gaining a conviction in a civil rights case.

"Hands Up, Don't Shoot" was BS, and the Feds investigation bears this out:

“There is no evidence upon which prosecutors can rely to disprove Wilson’s stated subjective belief that he feared for his safety,” the report said. At the same time, it concluded that the witnesses who said that Mr. Brown was surrendering were not credible.

“Those witness accounts stating that Brown never moved back toward Wilson could not be relied upon in a prosecution because their accounts cannot be reconciled with the DNA bloodstain evidence and other credible witness accounts.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/u...f-rights-violations-in-ferguson-shooting.html

 

The narrative was always more important to some than the truth:

Among the witnesses who told investigators that they had been nervous about corroborating Mr. Wilson’s account was a 31-year-old black woman who had been standing on her brother’s balcony at the time of the shooting. Her initial account to investigators, in which she said that she saw Mr. Wilson fire shots into Mr. Brown’s back as he lay dead on the street, was inconsistent with the autopsy findings.

When federal investigators challenged her, she admitted lying, explained to the F.B.I. that “you’ve gotta live the life to know it,” and said she had been afraid to contradict stories that Mr. Brown had been trying to surrender.

She then “admitted that she saw Mr. Brown running toward Mr. Wilson, prompting the police officer to yell ‘freeze,’ ” the report stated. It added that the woman said that “it appeared to her that Wilson’s life was in danger.” But when local authorities later tried to serve this witness a subpoena to appear before the grand jury, the report said, “she blockaded her door with a couch.”