The Justice Department said it would not file federal civil-rights charges against the former Ferguson, Mo., police officer who shot an unarmed black teen last year, saying the high legal threshold for such a case had not been met.
At the same time, the Justice Department painted a damning portrait of widespread racial bias in the Ferguson police department, releasing a lengthy report cataloging what the U.S. says is unconstitutional police treatment of blacks in the St. Louis suburb.
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The confrontation began when Mr. Wilson, riding in a police SUV, saw Mr. Brown and a friend walking in a street, and told them to move onto the sidewalk. Words were exchanged and Mr. Wilson backed up his vehicle to speak to Mr. Brown, according to witnesses. Though witness accounts differ, Mr. Wilson said Mr. Brown reached into his vehicle, striking him and trying to grab his weapon. Mr. Wilson fired at Mr. Brown, witnesses said, then got out of the car and fired at him again and killed him.
In an 86-page report on the shooting probe, prosecutors concluded "there is no evidence upon which prosecutors can rely to disprove [Mr.] Wilson's stated subjective belief that he feared for his safety."
Federal investigators concluded the claims by some witnesses that Mr. Brown was running away when he was shot were contradicted by forensic evidence and other witnesses. Claims by some witnesses that Mr. Brown had his hands up as if to surrender at the time Mr. Wilson shot him weren't reliable, prosecutors concluded.
You see the point here. It was never to go after Darren Wilson. The defense bar often reminds us that persons suspected of crime are real human beings, flesh-and-blood figures with strengths and failings just like the rest of us. But viewing Wilson in that way was never useful to the cause, so the usual meme (along with the typical caution about the presumption of innocence) got left on the editing room floor.
Wilson was seen less as a criminal suspect, or even as a human being, than as a cipher. He was the place holder for the White Devil -- the same White Devil that has made our criminal justice system just a racist charade. And that is why DOJ's quiet admission of the truth, that there was no evidence of racial animus, has to come out only now, with the summer's furor long since iced over.
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