Discussion for article #231174
When are ALL documents going to be released ?
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I love the way for every statement that Johnson makes they quote Wilson to contraict him. This is a hose job.
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“…He said he believes he has now released all of the grand jury evidence…”
If disclosing all the evidence is analogous to walking properly on the sidewalk, and if failing to disclose all the evidence is analogous to walking down the center of the street, the next scene would have the prosecutor shot by the government for suspected criminality.
After which, we’d investigate to see if the prosecutor had any vices in his past.
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The problem is that the objective, inarguable forensic evidence contradicts Johnson on a key point. That tends to diminish his credibility as a witness when it comes to other details, as well.
Contradicts? There are two portions to Johnson’s testimony – what he witnessed and the conclusions he drew from what he witnessed.
He saw Michael running. He heard a shot. He saw his friend stop and turn back the other way. He – incorrectly – deduced that his friend had been hit. He thinks that if his friend had not been hit his friend would have kept running.
Now, think about the matter from Michael Brown’s perspective. He starts off running. The cop shoots at him. Michael thinks if he keeps running he is going to get killed. So he turns around to surrender. The cop keeps shooting. So maybe Darren tries to get to the cop before he gets killed.
Officer Clueless is astounded at the rage on Michael’s face: Why was Michael so ferociously angry at me… all I was doing was shooting to kill him?
Edited to fix the names I garbled.
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Um, Darren Wilson was the cop. In any event, Johnson said that Wilson shot Brown in the back. The autopsy says that’s simply not true.
My point is simpler than all of this discussion, however. Eyewitness testimony is almost useless, especially when virtually all of the eyewitnesses involved have an ax to grind.
If others are going to decide that they know what happened even though they weren’t there, and are going to decide which witnesses they’re going to choose to believe, then they’re just engaging in self-indulgence to satisfy their own needs.
I still maintain that the key fact is whether Brown tried to grab Wilson’s gun, something we may never know. If he did, as another poster with a background as a prosecutor has pointed out (don’t remember who it was), then one party or the other was going to end up with a bullet in him, regardless of what happened in the ensuing seconds. That action would trigger an adrenaline tsunami, at which point calm reflection has become virtually impossible. You can’t try to grab a cop’s gun, then say, “Oh, never mind! I didn’t really mean it!” Too late. Did Brown do that? I don’t know. Neither do you.
The witness closest to Brown and the cop car has repeatedly and consistently stated to the Ferguson cops as well as the FBI that Wilson backed his car up in a reckless manner into the jaywalkers. He then reached out of the window and grabbed Brown by the neck or shirt and drew him into the police car. My guess is he was so enraged by Brown’s lack of respect for him that he irrationally decided to teach the “boy” a lesson by threatening him with his drawn pistol at close range. Of course Brown attempted to defend himself from the life threatening provocation by putting his hand between the gun and himself which resulted in Wilson shooting him in the hand. Brown was able to break free from the enraged cop and begin running for his life. Wilson fired 12 shots over the next few moments, six of which impacted Brown and six went into the surrounding neighborhood at random. One could have gone so close to Brown’s head that it really got his attention enough that he stopped running and turned around. And was shot six times by Wilson, two times when he was down or going down. Did he really need to kill Brown? My guess would be no. Wilson provoked the violence not because Brown was an immediate threat but because he had been “dissed” by a “nigger” who he felt needed some “come uppance”. He escalated the violence then ended it finally with shots 11 and 12 killing the kid. Brown was rude and insulting perhaps but Wilson was an enraged, irrational cop responsible for the death of yet another unarmed Black man. And the people of Ferguson reacted with at first peaceful protests against the killing.
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I must admit that I admire your psychic abilities. Would that we were all so blessed.
Sorry for garbling the names. When you look at Johnson’s actually testimony in the piece above Johnson acknowledges that he did not see a bullet go in but justifies his claim by a deduction based on what he did see his friend do… turn around. I’m trying to disentangle two things…what Johnson reports on the basis of sensory evidence and what he then deduces as the cause of what he saw. He was wrong on his deduction … indeed Brown was not shot in the back… but 12 shots were fired and my impression is that Johnson’s sensory impression is right … some were fired at Brown while he was running away.
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My theory based on the very consistent testimony of the nearest eye witness has as much credibility as that of Wilson and his cover story conjured up by the Ferguson police department and carefully released and leaked to the media by the DA. The eye witness testimony of Johnson would have been given a much larger role had this tragic and unnecessary killing gone to trial. Convenient for you to dismiss eye witness testimony when the majority stated that Brown had his hands raised when he stopped and turned around and the closest eye witness states that Wilson provoked the in car confrontation by grabbing Brown and pulling him into the window isn’t it?
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Not a matter of convenience. There’s just a growing mountain of evidence that eyewitness testimony is worse than useless. And when it’s coming from a place like Ferguson, in which the population appears to be divided into two warring camps, that testimony is even less likely to be reliable.
You’re implying that I’m working very hard to give Wilson a “pass.” I can’t imagine why I would be doing that. I simply think that this tragedy isn’t as simple as many here would make it out to be. There seems to be a lot of motivated reasoning going on. Some seem to have decided, very early on, that this was a case of “psycho killer cop guns down Theo Huxtable just for the sheer thrill of it,” and there have been at least some frankly embarrassing gyrations undertaken to maintain that myth.
Contrast that with the Eric Garner and Tamir Rice deaths - in both cases, I think the cops should be on trial for murder. And in the case of Tamir Rice, I think I’m on pretty solid ground when I say that if the person in the playground with a gun had been some fat, white, open-carry POS with an AR-15, he would not have ended up dead.
Other forensic evidence proves Darren Wilson lied. And yet his credibility was not commensurately diminished. The eyewitnesses whose testimony tended to put Wilson in an unfavorable light were discarded after one or two of their comments didn’t add up. But that also didn’t happen with either Witness #10 or Witness #40, both of whom McCulloch spotlighted but without mentioning their considerable inconsistencies. How do we explain that?
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Some docs can’t be released until DOJ completes their investigation.
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You accepted whole cloth that Brown was attempting to “grab Wilson’s gun” and I prefer to see the alternative to the contrived explanation by the cop and the police department. Sometimes eye witnesses give dubious testimony and sometimes they don’t but for you to believe the cops cover up story by throwing out the “Brown was attacking the cop and trying to grab his gun” and ignoring the evidence that he was pulled into the car is just unacceptable to me.
No, I did not. Read again. I said, very clearly, that I don’t know whether that’s what happened or not. And neither do you.
Your exact words Neutron
So which part of “Did Brown do that? I don’t know” do you find confusing? How, FFS, do you read that as “accepting whole cloth that Brown was attempting to grab Wilson’s gun?”
I’m sorry, but you seem to be either delusional, or unable to parse a simple declarative sentence.
I can’t imagine why either but there’s no doubt you’re trying very hard to slant the discussion in Wilson’s favor. Indeed, the only people insistent on making this tragedy seem “simple” are the people who’ve accepted Robert McCulloch grossly unexamined presentation of the “facts,” you included.
“I still maintain that the key fact is whether Brown tried to grab Wilson’s gun, something we may never know. If he did, as another poster with a background as a prosecutor has pointed out (don’t remember who it was), then one party or the other was going to end up with a bullet in him, regardless of what happened in the ensuing seconds. That action would trigger an adrenaline tsunami, at which point calm reflection has become virtually impossible.”
Whether Brown tried to grab Wilson’s gun seems wholly irrelevant to everything except the wound Brown suffered to his hand. The other bullet wounds took place considerably thereafter, and at a considerable distance, and I’m afraid the notion that adrenaline from the hand-to-hand struggle in the car is then responsible for every one of Wilson’s ill-advised actions that followed is patently absurd. The only serious question is exactly how far Brown was from the car and what kind of danger Wilson was legitimately in. That’s where the eyewitness testimony comes in, despite your apparent attempts to discard it. Only one eyewitness described Brown as “charging” Wilson, which is likely the only scenario in which the officer could legitimately claim to fear for his life, and even then it’s a stretch. According to some fairly intricate and thorough measurements done after the no bill was handed down, it was proven that Brown was more than 140 feet from Wilson’s police sedan when he was shot down. (I’ve given you that link in any reply to you.) The amount of conflicting testimony and forensics makes it nearly impossible for Wilson’s story to be factual. Yet, despite your claim of “not knowing,” it’s clear where your sentiments lie.
I give up. I surrender. You and several other posters here seem to be bound and determined to put words in my mouth, and to ascribe motivations to me that I simply don’t have, despite the clearest statements I can possibly make to the contrary.
Forgive me for getting in the path of your relentless agenda.