I’ve missed it as well. I don’t know that it has been covered.
Reading this thread is pretty much all I know about the scene, but my impression was that the bullet went through part of Brown’s hand, into the door’s interior side, where it broke out the window, because the window was rolled down. Is that correct?
Before I started reading this thread yesterday, I knew so little of the scene that I had to double-check to see which guy was Brown and which was Wilson, because the OP just threw those out there assuming we knew that already. I was able to figure it out from what I already knew, but I had to think about it.
Ok, it looked like you’d already covered some of this up thread, but quickly I think that it’s not that unusual to not get good prints from a crime scene. I know that when taking prints using ink it doesn’t always work well, so to me it’s plausible that in a struggle you might not get good prints. I don’t think it was only this case where this is true.
As for the struggle, I understand what you are saying, but really the evidence seems ambiguous wrt what transpired. The telling part, to me, is the shots fired inside the car. It doesn’t seem plausible to me that an officer would grab a suspects arm, struggle with that suspect as he tried to pull away and draw and fire his gun inside that car. The only reason I could see an officer drawing and firing his gun inside the car would be if there was a struggle for the gun…otherwise, it seems to me the officer would try and grab the suspect with both hands and, failing that, would be rapidly getting out of the car to then draw his gun if the suspect was running. I concede that it could be as you seem to be saying and as Johnson’s testimony says, and like I said the forensic evidence seems to be ambiguous on this point. I was merely saying that the lack of fingerprints doesn’t, in and of itself tell us much.
As to your point about the lack of gun shots on the audio, the only plausible explanation I can think of is that they were muffled from being fired from inside the car with the windows closed or being blocked by the suspect either as he struggled to get away from the officer or struggled to get the gun. That shots were fired inside the car, I thought, was an established fact, however. Not so?
[QUOTE=CurtC]
Reading this thread is pretty much all I know about the scene, but my impression was that the bullet went through part of Brown’s hand, into the door’s interior side, where it broke out the window, because the window was rolled down. Is that correct?
[/QUOTE]
I’m in a similar boat…I’ve been avoiding this subject wrt participation in the various threads on the subject, just lurking and reading what folks are writing. I thought 2 shots were fired from inside the car, and that it’s possible that one hit his hand, or that he cut his hand on the window during the struggle.
One other thing puzzles me, but maybe this has been covered already. If so, my apologies. But why did they leave Michael Brown’s body in the street for 4 hours after the shooting? That seems excessive…and excessively stupid. I think that, even more than the shooting itself, caused a lot of the rightful anger of the community. Watching the video on the BBC and AOL showing the crowd behind the police tape while Michael’s body lies in the street just seems pointless and stupid and cruel. What’s the explanation? Anyone know?
All of this has been covered in this thread. Coroner couldn’t get to the body because there was an unsafe situation with onlookers- they essentially blocked the area off. Reports of additional shots fired. Police can’t move the body till it was released by coroner. It was covered a short time after Brown died.
This was my impression, too. The window was all the way retracted into the door and the first shot entered the door and shattered the window.
It seems one of the main witnesses used to help Wilson evade charges may have been lying:
From earlier in the thread, steronz is relating what he is reading from the Grand Jury transcripts:
“Holy fuck, they actually brought this lady in to testify in person! The grand jury is asking her all about her racist stuff and her inconsistencies. This must be Witness 40, she asks if she can read the stuff she wrote down the day of the incident. Journal entry my ass.”
The Grand Jury was not unaware of the unreliability of this witness.
From what I understand this happened quite often, with witnesses for and against exaggerating, or outright lying on the stand. What I was reading is that the two schools of thought is that both the defense and prosecution was throwing everything including the kitchen sink to see what stuck (as well as to ensure that when the inevitable federal investigation of the trial comes they can say they didn’t hold anything back), to the prosecution deliberately trying to overwhelm the jury with a huge number of witnesses, many of who were known at the outset to be less than reliable.
nm - ninja’ed by Terr and XT.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s why I love this place (well…not that they ninja’ed you but rather that the SDMB can be relied on for, well, the straight dope with alacrity).
Weren’t all of the witnesses “main” witnesses?
Some witnesses are more reliable than other witnesses. Witness stories that agree with the forensic evidence should be given more weight but that decision is up to individual grand jury members.
I have no idea but certainly witnesses can vary not just in reliability but in what they witnessed.
Maybe one witness was around the corner but heard person-X say something while another may claim to have been ten feet away from the whole thing and looking right at the action the whole time.
(Just made all the above up for illustration…not meant to have any bearing on this actual case.)
The smoking gun article -
TSG claims that Sandra McElroy has a history of trying to insert herself into police investigations. She waited a month before going to the police with her story in support of Darren Wilson’s account. It is she who claimed she saw Brown charge Wilson like a football player. In the interim, she posted a number of times online in support of Wilson’s story.
Asked how she happened to be in the neighborhood and saw the shooting, McElroy initially tried to claim she was there to pop in on a schoolmate from 26 years ago but that she had the wrong address.
Later, on the stand, she changed her story. Now she claimed that she liked to cruise black neighborhoods and have coffee with the residents so that she could understand black people better. As evidence, she produced two notebooks which she claimed was her diary describing her daily activities. Her entry for the day of the shooting reads:
Yeah.
Again, this is nothing new. The Grand Jury was well aware of the unreliability and racism of the witness.
Of course the Grand Jury was aware of her racism and unreliability. That’s actually the article’s point, too.
Then why the breathless reporting with sensationalist “revelations”? There is nothing new in the article except the fact that they uncovered her name/past. The jury, as evidenced by their questioning, didn’t put much weight on her testimony, due to her obvious racism and unreliability.
You don’t see a problem with the prosecution allowing this woman to testify, when any even half-assed fact checking would have shown her to be unreliable (to put it charitably)?
As long as the jury knows she is unreliable and racist, no. The fact that the jury knows she is unreliable and racist and is lying in a pro-Wilson manner would put more pressure toward indictment, actually.