You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
But again, we have to keep in mind that Eric Holder has staved off his retirement all but explicitly to tackle this case. I reckon that bringing down the Ferguson police force is going to be his swan-song.
The decision is not "he's not guilty", it's "he's so unquestionably not guilty that to try him further would be a waste of time". That jury was either extremely bigoted, heavily misinformed, or most likely, both.
I think we can primarily attribute this to two things, which are related.
One is simple racism, the fact of the matter is that this man has been allowed to walk free after gunning down a black teenager for literally no reason at all. I will never be in danger of this happening to me, but my friends will be, and even if they were not, that this is happening at all, much less in the supposed land of the free, stirs a kind of molten hatred within me that I genuinely did not know I was capable of feeling. The amount of boldfaced denial required here is staggering, what you need to convince yourself of to say "there was absolutely no racial prejudice involved in this incident at all" is astonishing. There is that old Malcolm X quote about racism being a knife no one will acknowledge is there, and we have now doubled down on that, and are denying that knives exist at all, much less that they are capable of stabbing someone.
The other is this continued idea that police officers are somehow infallible superhuman beings who cannot ever do wrong, I know a police officer, and am in fact related to him. He is not a rotten-to-the-core terrible human being like Officer Wilson, but he makes mistakes, both personal and professional, all the time. In parts of this country (not the part I live in, thank god), we have decided that this is impossible. Cops are always right, 100% of the time, and every action they take and could possibly take is justified. It's created a sort of police state of popular conscience. A policeman can get away with anything as long as he operates in a district where the part of the public that is in power has a sufficient amount of trust in him to wave away any wrong he'd do.
All in all it's just....disgusting. There's really no other word for it.
"Officer Wilson followed his training and followed the law," the statement said. "We recognize that many people will want to second-guess the grand jury's decision. We would encourage anyone who wants to express an opinion to do so in a peaceful manner."
McCulloch told reporters that his heart "goes out" to the Brown family.
"It doesn't lessen the tragedy by the fact that it was a justifiable use of force," he said. "There's still a loss of life here, and that family is going to have that loss forever."
McCulloch urged protesters and community members who believed Brown's death was the result of larger social ills to "keep that discussion going" and "do it in a constructive way."
Oh drink gunpowder and swallow a match you fucking asshole.
He kind of has to say that. It's the fact that he didn't use his authority to charge Wilson directly that makes it ring hollow, however. But even then, the man is not in an enviable position.
I don't even have the energy to be properly indignant
I hope they don't think that this is over. The city's been in riots for months because of this. The riots aren't going to go away because a dozen people with no expert authority said that everything that happened that day was nice and legal.
I hope that Darren Wilson doesn't feel safe after this. I hope the Ferguson Police Department feels the eyes of the world on them. Because you can't just shoot a man down and then take control of the city by brute force and expect us to forget about it. Because every activist for the next twenty years will speak your name like a thundering preacher speaking on Satan. Because you made things harder for every police force that isn't completely terrible, and some of them are going to realize that and resent you for that.
You're right. Hell, I shouldn't have wished assassins on Wilson until I heard him speak.
I mean, I wish assassins on Zimmerman, but that's because he was a dick who used his notoriety from his trial to sell lame paintings like the chump that he is. Along with the whole spousal threatening, insulting the hell out of Martin's family and generally being a terrible person with a thin veneer of 'goodness'.
For all we know, Darren Wilson may just be a poor schmuck who screwed up, and not a completely terrible person to the bone.
As we reported earlier, "The grand jury is made up of nine white and three black jurors; seven are men and five are women. A decision on criminal charges requires agreement from at least nine of the 12."
Okay, this is better than the Trayvon jury, I guess.
You're right. Hell, I shouldn't have wished assassins on Wilson until I heard him speak.
I mean, I wish assassins on Zimmerman, but that's because he was a dick who used his notoriety from his trial to sell lame paintings like the chump that he is. Along with the whole spousal threatening, insulting the hell out of Martin's family and generally being a terrible person with a thin veneer of 'goodness'.
For all we know, Darren Wilson may just be a poor schmuck who screwed up, and not a completely terrible person to the bone.
I thought that the sting of Zimmerman getting away with it was softened by the fact that he quickly descended into a public laughing stock that nobody takes seriously.
Wilson, on the other hand, will continue to be taken seriously by parts of the population despite literally getting away with murder just because he's a police officer.
Honestly, I think that the rest of the local police forces in the St. Louis area already resent Wilson for this. He came out of a department that was dissolved due to pervasive corruption and went on to make a garish travesty of another department already under scrutiny. The ones that aren't so overrun with racist hicks and dirty cops (and some of the rest, I'm sure) are probably already thinking he's made their job twice as hard.
As for McCullough, I don't know what I would have done in his position. Probably recuse myself, yes, but if he really did want justice served, or thought that he did, I'm thinking he would want to prove that he could overcome that potential bias. Whether he did or didn't, at least in his own mind, I cannot say, but I can say that the fact that the evidence was so scattershot should have brought it to trial regardless of whether or not it was a losing case.
Also, as noted earlier, this could have been a two-to-one vote to take it to trial and it still wouldn't have gone through because of how the law is written, which is honestly absurd.
You're right. Hell, I shouldn't have wished assassins on Wilson until I heard him speak.
I mean, I wish assassins on Zimmerman, but that's because he was a dick who used his notoriety from his trial to sell lame paintings like the chump that he is. Along with the whole spousal threatening, insulting the hell out of Martin's family and generally being a terrible person with a thin veneer of 'goodness'.
For all we know, Darren Wilson may just be a poor schmuck who screwed up, and not a completely terrible person to the bone.
I thought that the sting of Zimmerman getting away with it was softened by the fact that he quickly descended into a public laughing stock that nobody takes seriously.
Wilson, on the other hand, will continue to be taken seriously by parts of the population despite literally getting away with murder just because he's a police officer.
That fact is pretty distressing to me.
Well, was a police officer. He certainly won't work in Ferguson again, if only because it'd mean riots on top of riots. And nobody in law enforcement will hire a guy who has Ferguson on his resume. But I see your point.
...I'm worried that this might fizzle out. The rage is running pretty fierce, but that doesn't mean it'll be enough to change things. Stand Your Ground still stands in Florida, even after the Trayvon Martin case made a fair mockery of it.
No doubt. It's less a matter of individual culpability than failures of policy, institutionalised profiling and general incompetence on nearly every level, with the Ferguson police collectively being the worst offenders but with so many other players being indirectly culpable in this mess.
I will give Nixon, Johnson and Holder props, though. They seem like good dudes.
^ The law won't withstand the battering it's taken in the long run. Look at that guy who shot that kid in his car. Something will break. It must.
He might have hired McCullough initially, but he didn't put him on this case.
Nixon is the governor, by the way, as in the one who brought in the highway patrol and has been supremely critical of the local police response from Day One.
Oh man, the bullshit @YesYoureRacist is digging up makes me want to change my Twitter avatar to the nuclear middle finger. Sooooo many unsympathetic fucking white people. Makes me sick.
An article I linked. It is unusual for grand juries not to indict, except in police killing cases.
In case anyone's not clear, "indicting" means formally accusing of a crime, which is followed by bringing the case to trial. The trial is where you get "convicted" or not. The grand jury did not decide that Darren Wilson was innocent of murder, they decided that the question of whether he committed murder does not need to be asked.
can he still be indicted for: 1. murder, in another indictment proceeding? (or would this count as double jeopardy?) 2. a lesser charge, such as manslaughter?
Honestly, I think that the rest of the local police forces in the St. Louis area already resent Wilson for this. He came out of a department that was dissolved due to pervasive corruption and went on to make a garish travesty of another department already under scrutiny. The ones that aren't so overrun with racist hicks and dirty cops (and some of the rest, I'm sure) are probably already thinking he's made their job twice as hard.
Oh man, the bullshit @YesYoureRacist is digging up makes me want to change my Twitter avatar to the nuclear middle finger. Sooooo many unsympathetic fucking white people. Makes me sick.
Twitter, with its 140-character limit, practically encourages unsavory, rage-inducing expressions of political opinion.
...I'm worried that this might fizzle out. The rage is running pretty fierce, but that doesn't mean it'll be enough to change things. Stand Your Ground still stands in Florida, even after the Trayvon Martin case made a fair mockery of it.
But "Stand Your Ground" wasn't even at issue in the Martin case; it wasn't a defense Zimmerman chose to use, and in terms of actual change to the law, it is very minor; the circumstances where you would have otherwise been legally required to retreat are few and apply to only a tiny proportion of self-defense claims. Also, a substantial proportion of US states never did have a duty to retreat in their self-defense law, and no notable difference in outcomes is observable.
The only real issue with Stand Your Ground is psychological; the push to change the law on self-defense may have encouraged people into an erroneous belief that they can use lethal force in other circumstances, even though nothing changed there.
I'm of the view that the verdict acquitting Zimmerman was actually correct in terms of the law; when someone claims self-defense in Florida or most other places, there is a pretty high bar to clear for the prosecution. They must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the self-defense claim is false.
The true racism is that "beyond a reasonable doubt" is a standard the prosecution is held to only for privileged defendants in the US a lot of the time. But I don't think the solution to that bias involves removing the principle from the law altogether; it should be applied to all, not none.
Comments
But again, we have to keep in mind that Eric Holder has staved off his retirement all but explicitly to tackle this case. I reckon that bringing down the Ferguson police force is going to be his swan-song.
One is simple racism, the fact of the matter is that this man has been allowed to walk free after gunning down a black teenager for literally no reason at all. I will never be in danger of this happening to me, but my friends will be, and even if they were not, that this is happening at all, much less in the supposed land of the free, stirs a kind of molten hatred within me that I genuinely did not know I was capable of feeling. The amount of boldfaced denial required here is staggering, what you need to convince yourself of to say "there was absolutely no racial prejudice involved in this incident at all" is astonishing. There is that old Malcolm X quote about racism being a knife no one will acknowledge is there, and we have now doubled down on that, and are denying that knives exist at all, much less that they are capable of stabbing someone.
Oh drink gunpowder and swallow a match you fucking asshole.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
As for McCullough, I don't know what I would have done in his position. Probably recuse myself, yes, but if he really did want justice served, or thought that he did, I'm thinking he would want to prove that he could overcome that potential bias. Whether he did or didn't, at least in his own mind, I cannot say, but I can say that the fact that the evidence was so scattershot should have brought it to trial regardless of whether or not it was a losing case.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
I will give Nixon, Johnson and Holder props, though. They seem like good dudes.
^ The law won't withstand the battering it's taken in the long run. Look at that guy who shot that kid in his car. Something will break. It must.
Nixon is the governor, by the way, as in the one who brought in the highway patrol and has been supremely critical of the local police response from Day One.
1. murder, in another indictment proceeding? (or would this count as double jeopardy?)
2. a lesser charge, such as manslaughter?
then the 2014 elections
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Because something, at some point, clearly went wrong.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
well, that everything's fine except for there are "unruly rioters" who just like setting buildings on fire. some people, right