No justice for family of Michael Brown | Featured |Axisoflogic.com

There will be no justice for the family of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

After three months of deliberations, a 12-member grand jury in St. Louis County, Missouri, did not find probable cause to press charges against Darren Scott, a white 28-year-old Ferguson police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man during a daytime confrontation on August 9.

The decision, which was announced on Monday night by prosecutors and preceded by an appeal for calm from Missouri’s Democratic Governor, Jay Nixon, was predicted by the Brown family’s legal team. The governor, who declared a state of emergency before the announcement, said that local churches would be open as “safe havens” if violence broke out. Turmoil is expected because the killing has become a symbol of deep and enduring institutional racism and excessive policing by in communities of color.

“The Grand Jury considered whether Wilson was the initial aggressor in this case, or whether Darren Wilson was authorized as a law enforcement officer to use deadly force in this situation, or if he acted in self-defense,” said St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert P. McColloch. “They determined that no probable cause exists to file any charge against Officer Wilson and and returned a ‘no-true’ [probable cause] bill on each of the five [possible killing-related] indictments.”

“The physical and scientific evidence examined by the Grand Jury, combined with the witness statements, supported and combined with that physical evidence, tells the accurate and tragic story of what happened,” McColloch continued, saying that the Ferguson police officer first heard about a local convenience store robbery suspect—before stopping Brown who matched that description.

McColloch said that the local police shared all of their evidence with the FBI, which has launched its own investigation under federal civil rights law, and would make that record public after his press announcement. He said those two investigations occurred in a sea of misinformation circulated by protesters and the media, including witnesses who later withdrew their testimony about seeing Brown gunned down.

The Brown family’s attorneys have said they did not expect a fair shake from prosecutors in St. Louis, a city with enduring racial divides where the authorities almost always side with the police. They pointed to Ferguson Police’s leaks to the media to smear Michael Brown’s character following his killing, to additional leaks during the secret grand jury proceedings—notably an autopsy report that Brown had not been shot multiple times in the back. These leaks suggested Scott would not face charges, they predicted, even for an unintended killing—second-degree murder or manslaughter—as Missouri law and jury instructions strongly defer to the use of deadly force by on-duty police officers.

The decision underscores for many Americans and especially communities of color that justice in America and the legal system are not the same. The grand jury’s decision was expected to spark new waves of protests across the country—if not immediately after Tuesday’s announcement, then all-but-certainly in coming days.

Several hundred protesters gathered outside the Ferguson Police Department on Monday night. At the 8 PM local time announcement neared, the mood became tenser, according to video feeds and tweets, where some protesters chanted, “We’ve got to fight back.” Those protesters grew silent as McColloch made his announcement and then erupted afterward, mixing indignation with resignation.

Across the country, civil rights leaders also predicted the highly emotional case would provoke string reactions. On Monday in the San Francisco Bay Area, clergymen were planning to hold vigils and open forums in churches, Dr. Amos C. Brown, a NAACP national board member and prominent local minister, told KQED-FM. “Why is it that violence is commonplace in the African-American community?” he asked.

“We are saying when the decision comes down regardless of what the decision is people should be out in the streets,” said D’Andre Teeter, a local organizer and member of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. “There should be no business as usual in the country.”

In Atlanta, protests are expected on Tuesday, according to AtlantaWordWorks.com, a group that usually promotes poetry but sent out a release late Monday “to express the moral outrage our communities are experiencing in Georgia, regarding racially charged police murders and state sanctioned violence.”

The Racial Bias In Law
Brown’s attorneys had been hoping for a second-degree murder charge, which is when a person knowingly causes the death of another. Eyewitnesses have said that there was an initial scuffle between Brown and Scott by the police car’s driver’s door, and then Scott fired at Brown as he initially was running away—but then stopped and faced Scott. But jury instructions in Missouri, which are read to the panel before it decides whether to press charges or not, allow police to use deadly force if the officer believes that it is “immediately necessary.” That formulation almost always protects the police from prosecution for using deadly force, because they will say they were threatened.

The St. Louis County grand jury’s decision, under state law, is only the first expected action from the legal system concerning the death of Michael Brown. The Department of Justice has also been investigating under federal civil rights laws and has not yet made any announcement on when its decision on pressing charges might be issued, although many legal commentators also have said that the likelihood of a Justice Department prosecution is also slim.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

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