The dozen jurors—nine white, three black—heard more than 70 hours of testimony from 60 witnesses. Faced with several conflicting accounts of the fateful 90-second encounter, they ultimately accepted Wilson’s testimony that he shot Brown because he feared for his life. McCulloch said physical evidence, including Brown’s autopsy and blood found in Wilson’s car and on his gun, supported the officer’s testimony that Brown was charging him, not surrendering, when he was fatally shot. Wilson testified that when he saw Brown and a friend jaywalking and told him to get on the sidewalk, the 6-foot-4, 290-pound teenager reached through his car window, punched him in the face, and struggled for his gun. When the gun went off and a bullet grazed Brown’s hand, the youth ran off. But when the officer gave chase, Brown turned and started sprinting toward him—“like a football player, head down,” in the words of one witness. Wilson said that when Brown got to within about 10 feet of him, he fired until “the threat was stopped.”
The grand jury’s decision was depressingly predictable, said The Boston Globe. “Prosecutors, by and large, give police officers the benefit of the doubt in deadly force cases.” But it’s still unclear why an officer trained to use the minimal amount of force fired 12 times on an unarmed suspect. A jury trial would have clarified the contradictions in this case. Now it’s up to federal investigators to decide if Wilson can be prosecuted for violating Brown’s civil rights. In addition, Brown’s family can still file a civil suit for wrongful killing.
The grand jury’s decision “deserves to be met with great deference,” said USA Today. “Unlike everyone else with an opinion,” the 12 jurors considered every single bit of evidence available and came to an unambiguous conclusion: “The death of Michael Brown was a tragedy, but not a crime.” The transparency of this process was a “credit to local officials,” said The Wall Street Journal. Hopefully, President Obama’s admirably balanced speech—encouraging calm while acknowledging that a “legacy of mistrust” exists between black communities and the police—will “lead to dialogue and not destruction.”
“Ultimately we don’t know—and will never know—exactly what happened” that day, said Danny Vinik in NewRepublic.com. But you can’t blame Ferguson residents for their distrust of the criminal justice system. McCulloch refused to recuse himself from the case, even though his police officer father was shot dead in the line of duty by a black man, and leaks from the grand jury appeared tailored to sway public opinion against Brown. An indictment and then an open trial would have shown that “Brown’s life mattered,” said Jamelle Bouie in Slate.com. But in this country, cops are almost never prosecuted for gunning down young black men.
Doesn’t the evidence matter? asked Jennifer Rubin in Washington Post.com. From the beginning, a “posse of pundits who view everything through a lens of racial injustice” decided that Wilson was a racist cop who killed a “gentle giant.” By creating this false narrative with “unreliable evidence from questionable witnesses,” the liberal media helped incite the violence in Ferguson. Brown’s death was “the wrong tragedy to wake this country up,” said John McWhorter in Time.com. The fact is that Brown stole a pack of cigarillos minutes before his death, defied a “reasonable request” from Wilson to get off the street, and then struck him in the face. Still, there’s a good reason why young black men like Brown have such “hostility to the cops.” In Ferguson, where white cops have ticketed, arrested, sexually abused, and killed African-Americans with impunity, that hostility was “totally justified.”
The “status quo” is no longer acceptable, said Roland Martin in TheDailyBeast.com. “The shameful racial inequities” in how police treat African-American communities have been exposed, sparking a national movement to make police “accountable to the people.” As a result of Ferguson, there will be growing pressure on cops to wear body cameras and “change the way they conduct themselves.” A half-century ago, brave men and women “broke the back of Jim Crow in Selma.” One day, we’ll look back on Ferguson as another turning point in our country’s troubled racial evolution.
