President Obama’s Justice Department has just issued "Department of Justice Report Regarding the Criminal Investigation into the Shooting Death of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri Police Officer Darren Wilson" (March 4, 2015). It’s surprising. It unequivocally exonerates Officer Wilson and says that he was acting in self defense. It doesn’t just say, “there isn’t sufficient proof” or “we cannot say beyond a reasonable doubt”. It goes into specifics and says that the conventional story, pushed by the mainstream media, was completely false. The Justice Department has not only failed to indict Wilson, they have decided it’s not even worth bringing the matter before a federal grand jury.
Will there be mass protests? Will Washington, D.C. be burned down? Will there be calls for President Obama to resign? Do black lives matter?
I thought the Ferguson grand jury documents definitely proved Officer Wilson innocent, that the Ferguson grand jury acted correctly in not indicting, and that it was even questionable whether the prosecutor should have brought the matter before a grand jury (but probably justified in light of public concern, for transparency). But that doesn’t seem to be the perception of many people, even educated people, though I don’t know if any of those people actually looked at the evidence. This could be the subject of a fascinating case study, perhaps even a comparative one comparing it to France’s Dreyfus case (though that took years to finish), on how elite opinion is formed by initial news reports and is hard to change even as more credible evidence appears.
Some quotes from the Justice Department report: