In the Pit thread on Ferguson, MO, the subject of other police shootings that resulted in murder convictions has been brought up.
As an example of a murder committed by police, I offered up the name of Fred Hampton.
The discussion in the Pit has involved, IMO, a lot of handwaving away of offered evidence of police killings as “well that wasn’t really a police killing because…” followed by reasons that the cop wasn’t really a cop when he or she killed someone.
So, since I expect the same thing to happen with regards to the murder of Fred Hampton (no charges were ever filed against anyone involved in the drugging, raid and murder of Mr. Hampton), I thought maybe we could debate it here and see what the consensus is amongst Dopers: was Fred Hampton murdered by the police?
I’m not sure it’s quite accurate to say the grand jury “cleared” the officers - they refused to indict, not exactly a statement that they’d done nothing wrong.
That no murder was found to have been committed is what your own cite says. If they have found anything new forty-five years after the fact, let’s hear it.
Shodan, no one is forcing you to participate in this thread. If you don’t want to read the wiki entry that I linked to and offer your own opinion, I don’t know why you would continue to participate; the OP didn’t ask for people to simply parrot what the grand jury said.
I did read the Wiki entry, and it said what I quoted. Since you don’t have any new facts, it would appear that the grand jury considered the evidence, including statements under oath, and, even with the advantages to the prosecution afforded by a grand jury vs. a trial, found no basis for an indictment.
So, in my opinion, there is not enough evidence to conclude that Hampton was murdered.
I didn’t notice you posting your opinion on the matter, with facts to back it up. If you just want to toss off a Wiki link and leave it up to others, the thread isn’t likely to go anywhere.
I read the citation. Then I looked up the law in my state concerning murder:
So we have cops raiding a joint full of cop-killers, and a cop-killer gets capped under less than perfectly acceptable circumstances. I don’t see this as murder, some lesser crime maybe, but this isn’t murder.
Given the political climate of the time, I find it only too easy to believe that Fred Hampton was deliberately assassinated by police and that a racist grand jury declined to indict those responsible. It’s possible that’s not actually what happened, but it is not even remotely a far-fetched explanation. Institutional racism that manifested itself in government-backed violence against black people in those days was so widespread that it’s difficult to give the benefit of the doubt.
It makes it pretty clear the the Federal GJ was in no way racist. A later GJ did indict several cops. The federal grand jury concluded that the original IID investigation was a complete sham, with each officer being asked questions which had been previously written up and given to them, along with a set of answers. The seven surviving apartment-dwellers refused to testify to the federal grand jury, and on that basis, the jury returned no indictments, but their report was unequivocal: “Physical evidence, standing alone and unexplained, is sufficient to establish probable cause to charge the officers with a willful violation of these survivors’ civil rights.”
Simply- there wasn’t enough evidence to convict the Police officers. Lots of evidence, true, but conflicting & contradictory testimony, sometimes from the same witnesses made the possibility of a conviction zero.
“* What really happened in the early morning of December 4, 1969? After countless grand juries and trials, all of the details are still not known, will likely never be known.”*
The problem with making that claim is that you have only conjecture and supposition, as opposed to evidence that might be used to convict someone at trial.
So I’ll say no: based on the evidence, there’s not enough reason to say that Hampton was murdered.