I understand all the corroborating witnesses were black. Or, at least that is what the prosecutor said.
There were lots and lots of witnesses who were worthless. Read the testimony, the police would turn off the recorder and say, “you’re lying” ... then turn it on and the witness would admit he was lying and say something else, often as silly.
A few witnesses said that Mike Brown got down on his knees in the middle of the street, put up his hands to surrender. The officer then walked up to him and pumped him full of bullets and he fell over in the street dead.
Some said the officer kept shooting him in the back until Brown died.
Really, it’s scary how some of the witnesses lied.
The author can say: “I don’t believe it.” all he likes.... but he has to deal with the FORENSIC EVIDENCE.
FROM THE ST. LOUIS DISPATCH:
EXCERPT:
Graham said the examination indicated a shot traveled from the tip of Brown’s right thumb toward his wrist. The official report notes an absence of stippling, powder burns around a wound that indicate a shot fired at relatively short range.
But Graham said, “Sometimes when it’s really close, such as within an inch or so, there is no stipple, just smoke.”
The report on a supplemental microscopic exam of tissue from the thumb wound showed foreign matter “consistent with products that are discharged from the barrel of a firearm.”
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The official autopsy also confirmed that tissue from Brown was found on the exterior of the driver’s side of Wilson’s vehicle.
“Someone got an injury that tore off skin and left it on the car,” Graham said. “That fits with everything else that came out. There’s blood in the car, now skin on the car, that shows something happened right there.”
The toxicology test, performed by a St. Louis University laboratory, revealed tetrahydrocannabinol, THC for short, in Brown’s blood and urine.
Alfred Staubus, a consultant in forensic toxicology at the Ohio State University College of Pharmacy, said that THC could impair judgment or slow reaction times but that there was no reliable measurement to make those conclusions.
States that have legalized marijuana have struggled with the issue of how to measure impairment.
“The detection of THC in the postmortem blood of Michael Brown really indicates his recent use of marijuana (within a few hours) and that he may or may not have been impaired at the time of his death,” Staubus wrote in an email.
If it were a lie by the prosecutor, we would have heard about it.