Posted on 09/10/2014 12:13:37 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Michael Brown’s body may be gone, but a serious effort is afoot in St. Louis County to assassinate his character — just as a Missouri grand jury is deciding whether to charge police officer Darren Wilson in his killing last month.
Judge Ellen Levy Siwak, a St. Louis County Circuit Court judge, had to deny two separate petitions Tuesday by media outlets trying to get their hands on Brown’s juvenile criminal records. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and GotNews.com are both seeking the records, even though a juvenile court official said last week that Brown had no serious felony convictions as a juvenile.
But that hasn’t deterred the media outlets.
This has become a familiar chapter in the journey to justice for unarmed black men and women who are killed by police or vigilantes. It happened to Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, Eric Garner and many others who were choked to death or gunned down for no justifiable reason.
St. Louis County police officials made their first foray into character assassination when they released images shortly after his death allegedly showing Brown assaulting a store clerk while stealing a box of cigarillos. Though it has been well established that Wilson had no knowledge of any allegations that Brown had committed a crime when he encountered the teen walking down a Ferguson street, the police were clearly trying to let the public know that Brown was a bad guy.
The release of the images reportedly angered Attorney General Eric Holder and Justice Department officials, who knew they would inflame already smoldering tensions in Ferguson.
In Siwak’s courtroom, Joe Martineau, attorney for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, argued that there is a public interest in Brown’s background. GotNews.com editor-in-chief Charles Johnson has said the public deserved to know whether a record existed for Brown.
Johnson said he is considering appealing the judge’s decision.
Journalistic standards certainly do not dictate that the public “deserves” any information about Brown’s background if that information has nothing to do with the case at hand. Of course it is expected that any publication is going to try to dig up whatever it can about the major actors in an explosive case such as this one. But we are well aware of what will happen if any negative information about Brown is made public — it will give members of the grand jury (nine of whom are white and three are Black) pause in their deliberations about whether to charge Wilson with a crime.
These were the same calculations made by the jury when deliberating the fate of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin: If the teen really did present a danger, perhaps Zimmerman was justified in killing him.
Now, it appears the same story is being repeated.
The left, led by our Racist in Chief and his felonious right hand gangster Holder, is using incidents of white people defending themselves against black thugs and criminals as justification for a war on white people.
Sometimes it is that simple.
It’s not “class” warfare, it’s not socioeconomic. It’s race warfare, officially sanctioned by the US DOJ. The violence committed by black thugs is going to get a lot more widespread and increasingly severe.
Chew on this:
Five years from now what honest, moral and qualified white person is going to want to join the police force in any decent sized city?
The goal of Obama et al is to destroy the integrity of our police forces just as it is fomenting rot in our military. We haven’t begun to see ugly yet.
I suppose you could start a rumor that Brown was on the cusp of perhaps, maybe, being involved with a Kardashian. That would get TMZ on the case.
Although, TMZ's head, Harvey Levin was being compared to Cronkite in an article the other day.
According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:
character assassination
noun
: the act of saying false things about a person usually in order to make the public stop liking or trusting that person
So since the issue is whether or not the government must release factual information, unless there is some evidence that the information held by the state is 'false', it can not be 'character assassination' to release the material.
So the statements by Nick Chiles equating releasing Brown's records or photos of him apparently committing a strong-arm robbery are not 'character assassination' in any sense.
And consequently, Nick Chiles can not be considered to be a 'journalist' or a 'truth-teller' in any sense.
He has a Pulitzer Prize. Welcome to 2014.
I had always assumed that when investigating a case, all previous actions by both sides are inadmissible in court. Is this untrue?
The dead guy’s records are being kept private and the guy who shot him couldn’t be found after the incident. The police filed a virtually blank incident report.
This is beginning to look like a clash between two aholes.
thug and red diaper doper baby
The notion that ‘a young man of color’ can behave anyway they want to with NO consequences is grotesque at best. If you are a thug and a punk and you terrorize people and put a beat down on a cop while high why should you expect to be allowed to walk free???? Frankly I am glad another such as this no longer is causing problems
Because Mr. Brown’s track record - and Officer Wilson’s track record, for that matter - should be of no importance to this case, right?...Leftists are ridiculous. And, in many cases, vile.
means nothing
Weren’t Earl Warren, John Roberts, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor appointed by Republicans?
I think we need a second opinion from Robert Bork.
That’s not technically an effort to assassinate his character by getting his juvenile records out. It’s an effort to expose his true character instead of the one being painted by the media. Kind of the way Obama’s true character was hidden from the American people when he first ran (no, we didn’t need to know his university record or anything about his dissertations-suddenly the public didn’t need to know anything).
remember the family has an out of state professional shakedown lawyer who is looking to be the al Sharpton of these opportunity cases.
Does that state have a civil suit immunity law?
Judge Seeeewhack?
Hiding the perp’s record?
How did that skirt ever become a JUDGE?!
CNN is using a despicable method of showing the picture. CNN screen capture a still from a moment when the officer was about to hold up an award certificate. This makes the officer look ominous.
The Brown picture is of him with a baseball cap pushed back in child fashion.
CNN is doing blatent assassination and trying to manipulate the story into a bloody mess.
The fact that he even has juvie records assassinates his character.
I heard HVAC mentioned a couple of times soon after the story broke and haven't heard it since, mostly radio and TV updates of the story which talk about how he was looking forward to starting "college".
If this were a redneck, and the officer was black, the records would have been on the front page before the body was cold.
Indeed they all were
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