Michael Brown shooting - justified?

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I wasn't talking about Brown being on his knees or not, or if he was fleeing or not, but the fact that he can not be called a felon because he had never been convicted of a crime - now he never will.

I'm not sympathetic to police in cases like this (see my first post to this thread), but I'm also not sympathetic to race-baiters who want to convict the officer on the testimony of a shady witness. With that in mind...

When I last checked, it hadn't been established that Brown was fleeing. I don't know whether a cop can ever legally shoot a fleeing suspect who isn't carrying a weapon. The NYPD shot a presumably-armed murder suspect who was not brandishing his weapon (wounding several bystanders in the process), and I don't remember them getting in trouble. I read recently about an officer shooting a suicidal man who refused to put down a weapon, even though the man hadn't threatened the officer. I don't like any of these cases.

Was Wilson carrying a Taser?



Evidence? Minneapolis cops look downright average.



I've served on a jury also. The defendant was a black woman who had almost certainly robbed a store. The evidence left reasonable (if tiny) doubt, so we acquitted her. That's all I'm asking you to do here, and only temporarily.



The wound pattern could fit the story that Brown was standing at 35' with his hands up, but two witnesses gave conflicting accounts. Dorian Johnson said that Brown was shot in the back. (He claimed that he was right next to Brown when it happened.) Piaget Crenshaw said that Brown was shot as he ran. The autopsy showed that Brown was shot only from the front. Tiffany Mitchell's story is the most consistent with the autopsy, but she didn't come forward until four days later*, and she was vague about whether Brown had been shot in the back. She's an associate of Crenshaw.

(*By that point, pundits had already convicted the officer in absentia on the basis of testimony by a petty street-thug, and that of another witness whose account has since been discredited by the autopsy.)

Last edited by NobodyKnows on 19 Aug 2014, 10:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Here's an analysis of some of the evidence:

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/08/19/w ... ael-brown/

If the remorseless right-winger above can give Brown the benefit of doubt, why can't CBS, CNN and The Daily Mail do the same for the officer? If they were half as fair as "one of the right-wing bloggers whose 'wild and hateful claims' helped destroy CBS?s story about the Bush National Guard memos", then we'd have a pretty constructive debate.

BTW - If should be pretty easy to establish whether Wilson's eye was fractured, since there would usually be an X-ray involved in that diagnosis. We'll see.

They can.

Though from the wound patterns, it looks like none could be conclusively said to be from the back. Perhaps some may have missed, and then Brown turned around and charged. That will be hard to prove purely on eyewitness accounts.

There were some more unsubstantiated reports today. The grand jury tomorrow should hear some real evidence and eventually so will everyone else.

I'd be surprised if it makes it past the GJ, unless evidence that the state has is enough to convict (which they haven't released).

I can't see "murder" able to be proven going by eyewitnesses + the forensics released so far.

They have to show he intended to murder Brown. Good luck with that.

I very much doubt the cops gets charged too, if he was a private citizen sure but cops aren't held to the same standard.

If Brown broke into a local house and was killed in the same way, I doubt that would go anywhere either.

Nor do I think it would have turned into the circus it has if such happened.

Brown didn't break into a house tho, he was unarmed and shot 6 six times in the middle of the street. 100% a civilians gets detained and probably charged with something.

Sure there is. If Michael Brown already tried to take his gun once, and was attacking him again, and the officer had no backup, and may not have been an expert in hand to hand fighting, he could reasonably assume his life was in danger.

If you take a puff yourself you won't smell it anymore.

Pssshhh, people are still way undereducated about cannabis and the people that use it.

Ok, first the officer is supposed to be trained in hand-to-hand fighting, no? Aren't officers trained in how to subdue suspects without resorting to deadly force?

Beyond that, there's no evidence that the officer's life was in immediate danger. If an unarmed man is charging at you from more than 35 feet away (I say more than 35 feet because if he was charging, and was shot at 35 feet, he must have started charging from beyond 35 feet), you have many options before that man can actually bring some sort of deadly force to bear against you. You can run, you can take out your nightstick, taser, pepper spray, etc. If the man was a few feet away from the officer, arm cocked, ready to punch, *maybe* the officer's life would have been in immediate danger. But 35+ feet away, at that moment an unarmed suspect can do nothing more than flail his arms about at the air. There is no way an officer with an array of non-lethal weaponry designed to subdue suspects should ever lose a fight like that against an unarmed man, even if the officer was not equipped with a gun. The idea that the officer's life was in danger seems a lot more like an after-the-fact made-up 'justification' based on vastly overstated danger than anything actually legitimate.

If the officer was justified in this case, then basically any police officer anywhere can claim that he felt his life was in danger just by the mere presence of another person in the general vicinity of the officer. The officer only has to claim he felt threatened by the actions of the other person, and especially in the absence of any witnesses, the officer can completely make up facts about the suspect's behavior in order to basically justify murder.

That's a big "should". Not everyone is a good fighter. Even if they are, anyone can get killed in a fight. And it can come down to who is bigger. And, the guy was apparently looking to take his gun. If you have a gun, 35 feet away is a good time to use it against someone trying to kill you. Tasers don't always stop a determined person, I've seen videos.


That could very well turn out to be the case. If so, he's guilty of murder.



It's always been true that if there are no witnesses, cops can get away with anything. Just like criminals can.

Funnily, if Brown assaulted someone in the street, and the fight went down how some say it did, then the civilian shouldn't be charged with anything (though she'd have to explain to the police why she couldn't flee, but there's justifiable reasons for that).