Posted on 09/05/2014 4:01:52 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Moves to uncover the youth records of the 18-year-old Black youth are misplaced and akin to efforts to blame the victim.
In the days after Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, there was a behind-the-scenes tug of war between the local police officials and the Justice Department over the integrity of releasing a video of the 18-year-old Black man shoplifting some cigars from a neighborhood convenience store.
Justice Department officials contended that releasing the unflattering video of Brown served no practical purpose and that it was motivated by a desire to portray the young man in a negative light. That, they wisely concluded, might further stir passions on the streets of Ferguson in an already tense period.
The Ferguson police, however, dismissed the concerns and requests of the Justice Department and went ahead with the release of the video. The video, shot in a convenience store, have no bearing on the shooting of Brown. In fact, the police officer who shot the young man made clear that he knew nothing of the event when he confronted Brown on that fateful afternoon on a Ferguson street.
In cases like that of Michael Brown, just as in the case of Trayvon Martin, there is always an undercurrent of character assassination. There are forces that always seem to make effort to portray the unarmed, dead teenager as someone whose life was so checkered that the average person paying attention to the story might feel some degree of sympathy for Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who shot and killed Brown.
The issue of digging into Michael Brown’s past did not end with the video taken in the convenience store. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and an online journalist in California filed separate actions in the Family Court of St. Louis to expose whether Brown had legal troubles as a youth. In making their case, the organizations said the public had a right to know about any past indiscretions on the part of young Brown.
Such history is completely irrelevant to the decision to kill him (in the interest of full disclosure, I worked for the St. Louis newspaper during a summer while in college and my father had been the first Black reporter there in the 1940s through the early 1960s). Juvenile records are confidential in the state of Missouri. However, police have maintained that Brown had no criminal record as an adult. More than anything, Michael Brown deserves the same level of privacy that everyone else is entitled to in the state of Missouri.
People should abandon their witch hunts. If there is significant baggage to the life of Michael Brown, let it come out in the course of a swift trial against Darren Wilson, which would be the best outcome of this tragic event.
Oh, dear. Same with Trayvon.
Yeah, we can’t be allowed to run down the parent’s claims that their boy was a gentle giant who had never been in trouble before. That would mess with the narrative.
Dead men don’t have rights.
/johnny
Liberals never let the truth get in the way of their agenda. My quote, perfect application.
Real bad.
I love how blacks seem to like to hide the truth and advertise the lie.
What are you really afraid of there Jon???
He didn’t have any ‘record’ as an adult because he’d just turned 18. Give a fella time, already.
This writer claims his dad was a reporter. Obviously, the kid learned nothing. He’s an awful writer.
Do blacks have any idea how shallow this makes them look?
So many of them are stuck on 13, unable to own up to any responsibility on their part, or the part of members of their race.
I’d be hard on whites for acting this way. And if it were whites playing the knock out game against blacks, I’d be furious about it.
Alas, until blacks grow up and act like adults on these issues, I’ll simply have to consider the most vocal ones to be stunted in their growth, stuck intellectually on 13.
Maoists hate it when folks know too much.
Best portray the cop as a gentle-giant killer then; don’t want to pry....
The best predictor of future aggressive antisocial behavior is a history of similar behaviors, especially with an early onset.
“If there is significant baggage to the life of Michael Brown”
That’s exactly what they’re doing you jabbering idiot.
I think the desire to make the records public is because of the patently false narrative of the “gentle giant” created by the main stream propaganda media.
Given these pictures of the “gentle giant” flashing gang sign, folks figure that where’s smoke there must be fire:
A Freeper identifying him/herself as a Missouri lawyer weighed in on this *very* subject about a week ago.He/she mentioned a decision in Missouri case law that specifically ruled that juvenile criminal records are,in fact,private in Missouri but *ONLY* while the individual is alive.The state's privacy law is only for the benefit of the individual him/herself.I guess that's tied in to the fact that under English Common Law a deceased person cannot be "slandered" of "libeled" in the legal sense.
How does getting the juvenile records blame the police officer that was attacked by the thug.
They don’t care what we think. It’s one of the pillars of their society, if you can call it that.
That is what this is all about
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