Some of the people on dailykos.com are as fact-challenged as the conservative right. And also otherwise challenged. To quote anything from the nearly 5000 pages of released transcript of the Ferguson Grand Jury that corrects or contradicts what they say is to become a right-wing racist troll, apparently.
So when someone writes that Witness #40 is the only one that corroborated the Wilson account that Michael Brown charged at him, and I point out that Witness #10 also said so, suddenly it appears I have endorsed the Grand Jury proceedings and believe that witnesses have testified and have been properly cross-examined.
Hence this diary. I want to record in a diary and not in some scattered comments a few things. Below the symbol.
For the sake of argument, let us stipulate that Michael Brown did assault Officer Wilson, and then fled. Since Michael Brown poses no other danger, is the officer justified in shooting at him? Can't he be apprehended at leisure? The answer I've received from here and from there is that, in America we have apparently granted police officers that right to shoot. Why we don't withdraw that right is our own fear. Apparently Americans believe that the police (and perhaps the guns they own) is all that is standing between them and violent anarchy; and letting someone who has even mildly tussled with a police officer get away, even temporarily instead of shooting at him at once, is the first step down a slippery slope.
I am one who believes that society works because of the inherent law-abiding nature of citizens - at least, I believe the culture I'm native to works because of that - and not because of the police, so I find this incomprehensible. There is no slippery slope to slide down. A Michael Brown can be arrested for assaulting a police officer later, there is no need to shoot.
But then America is a violent society on a scale incomprehensible to anyone not grown up here. I had major blinders shed when I read some years ago, that the Kashmir insurgency in the 1990s (you know the one which the New York Times and the Washington Post keep editorializing about, nuclear flashpoint, etc.) in terms of scale of violence, would put it only in the mid-ranks of American cities; something like half-as-bad-as-Chicago (at that time). This was in a paper published from an American military college. So lifelong Americans know best about whether there is a slippery slope or not. To me it is just incomprehensible.
Then there is on top of that the confounding problem of race.
OK, back to the Ferguson Grand Jury transcript.
I haven't yet read the journal of Witness #40. But Witness #10 is identified, e.g., on page 156 of this document, and the claim that Michael Brown charged is on pages 166-167.
Page 166:
The officer was already in pursuit of him. He stopped. He did turn, he did some sort of body gesture, I'm not sure what it was, but I know it was a body gesture. And I can say for sure he never put his hands up after he did his body
Page 167:
gesture he ran towards the officer full charge.
....
....
Mike Brown continuously came forward in the charging motion ....
Regarding the judgment of whether Michael Brown was charging Wilson, page 88 of this document
http://www.documentcloud.org/... is worth noting. It is regarding the bloodstains. I had earlier asked the question in a comment:
http://www.dailykos.com/... , now I have an answer.
GRAND JUROR: I know we've heard evidence that Michael Brown after he turned around and advanced back towards Officer Wilson, and we have our diagram of the crime scene with the measurements on it and I just want to make sure I'm interpreting all of this right. So far as physical evidence we have the blood on the ground that was about 21 or 22 feet from where Michael Brown ended up. So we know for a fact that's a minimum distance he might have advanced and from eyewitness testimony that placed him at the corner of Coppercreek, that dimension looks like it is closer to 48 to 50 feet; is that correct? So that would be like an outer --
A: I'm going to look at this diagram also just so I'm sure we're on the same page here.
So you're saying, obviously this would be zero right here, right.
GRAND JUROR: The distance was 48 feet 2 inches according to this diagram.
....
This is pertinent to the claim that Michael Brown charged, make of it what you will. I haven't yet collated which witnesses say that Michael Brown reached as far as the corner of Coppercreek, and what else they say about those final moments.
Since nearly 5000 pages is difficult to go through, if any of you have that information with references to the page #s, I'll thank you in advance.