12/01/14 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I got Will Grigg on the line.
He writes the great blog, Pro Libertate, at FreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com.
FreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com.
The latest one is called, Is Disarming a Cop a Capital Offense?
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, I'm doing well.
Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Very happy to have you on the show here again, as always.
Geez, the radio show is called Freedom Zealot.
Kiwi6.com is where it's located.
Kiwi like the fruit.
Kiwi6.com slash artists slash Freedom Zealot.
You can find the link there at FreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com as well.
Will Grigg, as you probably know, is one of the foremost defenders in writing of, well, all American civilians from the depredations of our local police.
And he does a great job of chronicling their abuse.
So now here's the thing, Will, is I want to know everything that you think and have to say about Ferguson, but I'm going to have to settle for a small portion of that, I'm afraid, because there's so much to talk about, so many different angles, race and the cops and everything.
But I guess I want to start with what you think really happened that day.
I know you've had a chance to look at the testimony, and obviously you're not there on the grand jury, and eyewitness testimony is what it is and that kind of thing.
But then again, I've been reading you since 1994 or something, and I've got a lot of respect for your BS detector.
So I just wanted to see whether you could give us your kind of best estimation of what you think really happened and then what should have happened.
It's pretty clear that Michael Brown was credibly suspected of stealing cigars in an act of strong-arm robbery, and he most likely was burdened with that knowledge when he was confronted by Wilson.
On the basis of what we've read in the testimony and Mr. Wilson's specific account, there's plenty of cause to suspect that this was an escalation rooted in Wilson's offense over an act of contempt of cop.
I don't know whether Brown instigated the conflict by striking Wilson, as Wilson claimed.
There's certainly nothing in the post-altercation photographs from his examination of the hospital that suggests that he was on the receiving end of several facial blows by a 300-pound man who was roughly his same size.
That's an important part of the story, is that these two men were roughly the same size.
We've been told often that Brown was nearly 300 pounds and 6'4", Wilson 6'4", and about 225 pounds, and his weight was better organized.
You take a look at the photos, and it's pretty clear that if he'd actually been struck several times by a 300-pound man, there was no physical evidence to suggest as much.
There was an anomalous patch on his right side, the right side of his face.
It's not clear how he would end up with a condition on that side of his face if he's hit, while speaking through the driver's side window to a right-handed assailant.
But we don't know how the altercation began, but it's pretty clear that if he had been taken to trial, that Wilson would probably have mounted a successful defense on the basis of self-defense, on the basis of the ambiguity of the evidence to the contrary, or the conflicting claims that were made after the initial confrontation at the car.
But when he left the car to pursue Brown, he entered a different legal environment under Tennessee v.
Garner, the 1985 Supreme Court decision.
He doesn't have the right to shoot a fleeing suspect, simply because the suspect is trying to avoid arrest, unless he can make a claim that self-defense was involved.
And on that question, I don't consider the evidence to be dispositive of the idea that what he did, that is to say what Wilson did, would be unlawful, that he was involved in the unlawful taking of a life of a fleeing suspect.
People make a great deal of hay out of the fact that apparently Brown turned around and approached Officer Wilson at some point or another.
But we're not clear that his posture was aggressive, or that he actually posed a threat to an armed police officer who had already shot him a couple of times by this point.
So what I suspect happened is that you have an instant where adrenaline and outrage on the part of the cop over the contemptuous attitude of Michael Brown, first of all, precipitated the initial confrontation because Wilson makes it pretty clear, and the comments from his police chief immediately after the incident also make it clear, that Brown was never identified as the suspect in the robbery at the time of the initial encounter.
This is something that I think was retconned, if you will, into the narrative over the course of several weeks.
But a couple of points that I'd like to make here about what happened after the shooting that I think are very important.
The first of which is that Wilson was never identified as a suspect in the criminal homicide.
He was identified as the victim of an assault on law enforcement.
If he had been Citizen Darren Wilson rather than Officer Darren Wilson, then this wouldn't have been the case.
He would have been treated as a suspect in a criminal homicide rather than the victim of an assault.
He certainly would not have been allowed to leave the scene without making a statement to police or being taken back into custody of police to be questioned.
At that point he should have asked for his lawyer and not spoken until his lawyer was present.
But he was never in danger of facing criminal prosecution from the moment that the other police arrived on the scene because he had been identified as a presumptive victim.
And his shooting was presumed to be justifiable.
And so the other part of this narrative that I want to focus on is… Hold that thought for a second.
I want to get back to the actual happenstance there.
And I know we can't be definitive about it.
And believe me, I certainly want to hear from you all about the legalities of this.
But as far as what took place there, I guess I haven't done the work that you have done on this at all.
But I did read a piece over at Vox.com where they attempted to compare and contrast the testimony of Wilson with the testimony of Mike Brown's friend.
And they seem to tell pretty parallel stories with obviously very opposite spin on them.
But they both basically have the same sequence of events there.
And it sure seemed like if you can boil it down at least at the most important part where Mike Brown allegedly turned around and they say, oh, the evidence shows he turned around.
The way they say that on TV is, oh, well, for crying out loud, look, he turned around, turned around.
And turned around becomes that's it.
The point at which he forfeited his right to continue living was because, for God's sake, he turned around.
Rather than just, I don't know, keep running but then just jump and land prone on his belly but facing away from the cop or something like that.
But it seemed like his friend didn't dispute that he turned around.
His friend said that he turned around more or less, I'm paraphrasing here, to say, I don't have a gun, stop shooting, please, I give up, okay, okay.
Like, Jesus, I didn't know you were going to keep shooting at me as I'm running away.
Fine, I'll stop running away then, okay, my hands are up, don't shoot.
And yet, it didn't seem, to this day, like I just mentioned on the media, the way they cover it, it doesn't seem like this point was that anybody narrowed down on this, really.
That it sort of went with the, maybe the grand jury kind of was under the same assumption that the CNN people are on.
That, well, if it's conceded that at some point the young man stopped and did a 180, well then at that point Darren Wilson has the right to kill him, which would of course be the gigantic unsaid and unproven kind of underlying basis of the entire question, right?
They never have to say, listen, if the young man turns around, then you can kill him.
I mean, they elaborate and say, oh, he was going to charge him and all this.
But they don't ever have to really get to the charge part, they just get to the turnaround part.
Very quickly, two quick points.
Yes, the parallels between the testimony of Dorian Johnson and the testimony of Darren Wilson are quite striking.
And there are points of divergence that, of course, in Wilson's testimony was to his advantage.
You can consider them self-serving, you can consider them truthful, but they were to his advantage.
But on the subject of shooting a fleeing felon, it's important to point out that just before Wilson offered his testimony, Kathy Elizaday, who was the assistant prosecutor who questioned him, passed out what she described as the law in Missouri regarding justifiable homicide and the use of force by police.
And in doing so, she committed what would be a reversible error in court because she handed them the 1979 statute that was invalidated by the 1985 Tennessee v.
Garner ruling by the Supreme Court.
So she manipulated the grand jury by putting them in a frame of mind to be receptive to the claim that he had the right, that Wilson had the right to pursue and shoot Michael Brown on the basis of a statute that's now invalid.
And furthermore, the statute on books right now has been described as patently unconstitutional by Paul Cassell, the former federal judge in Utah who recently helped a killer cop get off.
So there's some, I think, reversible errors on the part of the prosecution that actually acted as defense counsel during this grand jury proceeding.
All right, stop right there.
We'll be right back.
Will Grigg, everybody.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
So sorry.
First I'm interrupting and then the commercials are interrupting.
All right, Will Grigg, again, back to Darren Wilson's shooting of Mike Brown and the fix in at the grand jury level.
And you can have the floor, sir.
Go ahead.
One of the things I think has gotten very little attention is the fact that back in February 2013, Darren Wilson was involved in an incident in which he arrested, single-handedly arrested and detained, a suspected drug dealer by the name of Christopher Brooks.
The arrest was carried out because Brooks had refused a warrantless search of his vehicle.
And according to Brooks, he was somewhat roughed up by Officer Wilson.
Here's the thing.
Christopher Brooks is almost six feet tall and he weighs 300 pounds.
And shortly after the shooting on August 9th, Wilson was scheduled to testify in a pretrial hearing for Christopher Brooks that would examine the charges against him.
He was no show.
He was supposedly in protective custody and in hiding.
Well, he was duty-bound to testify.
If you're dealing with somebody who's a potentially violent threat to the community, you're a police officer, you can require a security detail to escort you to the courthouse and one to take you back into hiding, but you really should testify.
He didn't show up to testify.
And we were told that this was because of the risks that he confronted.
I think the chief risk here is that a motivated defense attorney, representing Brooks, would have asked Wilson questions that would have complicated the narrative that he was sculpting with respect to the August 9th encounter.
Bear in mind, once again, Wilson was saying that he was overmatched by this physically imposing man who, as it turns out, is pretty much his same size.
He said that he was like a five-year-old child clinging desperately to Hulk Hogan in the face of an assault that included at least two punches, the third of which might have killed him, and that somehow mysteriously left his face largely or almost completely unmarked.
But yet this is the same man who received a commendation for single-handedly detaining and restraining a 300-pound suspect.
If you had had the defense attorney in the Christopher Brooks hearing ask Wilson to elaborate on the methods that he had used to restrain this man, it would have been very difficult for Wilson to maintain the characterization of a frightened and intimidated and physically overmatched person dealing with an aggressive predator.
And this addresses something that Wilson brought up in his grand jury testimony when he was asked by a very solicitous assistant prosecutor if he had ever committed his story to print or if he'd ever given a detailed version of the instance of that day to any of the investigators.
What he said is, no, my protocol is to call the FOP, the Fraternal Order of Police, and then they will lead me step-by-step through the process because they're the ones who have clear heads.
They've not gone through the trauma of a shooting.
Well, that once again is an advantage that no other criminal suspect, and of course he wasn't being treated as a criminal suspect once again, but no other criminal suspect in a homicide would have that opportunity.
He wouldn't be able to say, no, I'm not going to speak with you until a group of clear-headed police officers help me create a story that will meet the evidence as it emerges from the investigation.
And that is part of what I call the architecture of privilege, or if you will, blue privilege rather than white privilege, that protected Wilson from any kind of scrutiny in the aftermath of the shooting.
But I would really like to know more about the details of what happened in the case of Christopher Brooks and the fact that he avoided testifying there is something that a motivated prosecutor would have found suspicious.
Then again, a motivated prosecutor wouldn't allow an assistant DA to guide a potential suspect through a grand jury examination on at least three or four occasions, not only asking leading questions but supplying him with the answers.
If this had been an adversarial setting, then a prosecutor would have said, Your Honor, I object not only is defense counsel leading the witness, defense counsel is answering the questions.
The defense counsel is not offering testimony, the defendant is offering testimony.
But he never confronted that possibility once again, because from the minute that the call went out, he was treated as the victim.
And the testimony given by the initial responders here, I think the first one to offer testimony was a medical examiner, who displays the insouciance with which they treated this crime scene.
The medical examiner showed up and then he noticed, Oh, gee golly, Ned, I don't have batteries in my camera, so I can't take photos of the shooting scene.
He also pointed out that he didn't take measurements.
And that's an important thing with respect to the discussion we had about distances and about how far Michael Brown has supposedly traveled after turning around.
They ride for months, right?
They said he was 35 feet, and instead he was a hundred and something feet.
He's probably 130 feet, give or take, from the vehicle.
And we don't know how far he ran before he turned around, or how far the distance was between Brown and Wilson at the time of the shooting.
Those measurements weren't taken by the examiner on the scene.
Again, if we're talking about citizen Darren Wilson, rather than officer Darren Wilson, that's something that would not be allowed to stand.
Those measurements would have been taken.
You would have had crime scene photos taken.
You would have had a rigorous examination, not only of the clothing and the body of the decedent, but you would have had the same type of examination being made of the shooter.
Wilson left the scene at the instruction of the sergeant, who was the first to speak to the investigating detective from the St. Louis County Police, and who led him through the crime scene after it had been established that Wilson was the victim.
Wilson was told by his supervisor to leave the scene, to go back to the local station.
He went back to the Ferguson Police Station, and he took off his clothes, and then he washed his hands.
Now that's an important detail, because in washing his hands, he destroyed evidence.
We don't know if he actually took Brown by the throat, as Dorian Johnson said, because his hands and nails were never swabbed for Brown's DNA.
Brown's DNA was found outside the SUV.
Some of it was found inside the SUV.
It is, to use a term that has been beaten to death by analysts, consistent with being shot at close range, perhaps after going for the gun, or perhaps after trying to fend the attack away.
Dorian Johnson was saying that Wilson had threatened Brown, apropos of nothing, in reaction to no visible provocation, that he pulled a gun and threatened to kill Brown.
Whether or not you believe that story, we really don't know at what point he laid hands on Brown, if indeed he did lay hands on Brown, because he went back to the police station to destroy potential DNA evidence in a way that no criminal suspect would have been permitted to do.
It's just one of many ways that the much-described forensic evidence is absent.
I mean, we hear this mantra from people who defend the police, who defend Darren Wilson, that the forensic evidence demonstrates that the eyewitness testimony was incorrect.
And as a matter of fact, McCulloch went out of his way to deride some of the contradictory accounts by some of the witnesses that seemed to favor the story told by the defenders of Michael Brown here.
He wasn't able to do that with Darren Wilson, obviously, because Darren Wilson never made a statement.
He didn't fill out an instant report.
He didn't make a statement to anybody that wasn't covered by his garrity privilege.
Once again, it's the special immunity that cops enjoy in circumstances like this.
Nothing they say to their investigators under the protection of garrity can be used for the purpose of civil liability or criminal prosecution.
And so he wasn't able, McCulloch wasn't able, if he'd been inclined to, and he wasn't, to highlight contradictions between the original story told by the shooter and the version of the story that emerged after the evidence came in.
But the forensic evidence is not complete.
It isn't conclusive.
Some of the most important omissions here, some of the most important lacunae in the forensic evidence record reflects these privileges and immunities that Wilson enjoyed from the moment he was identified as the victim of this incident.
Well, now, here's one of the most striking things to me in here, which I heard it mentioned, I guess, a few times, but it hasn't gotten nearly as much play as I think is warranted, is Darren Wilson's language in describing Michael Brown as a demon bulked up to run through bullets, which is, of course, just outright defying English.
The bullets went through him.
He didn't go through them.
What the hell does that even mean?
It doesn't even mean anything other than somehow he's magical.
And I was afraid that no matter how many times I shot him, he was going to kill me anyway.
Yeah, this is the same bold and valiant police officer who had detained and arrested the 300-pound man and received an award for it.
Suddenly, he's resorting to the language of Marvel cartoons in order to impute these transhumanist characteristics to a man that has been caricatured in the public mind as a super predator because he was 18 and black and came from a distressed home.
Darren Wilson's background, by the way, was similarly distressed.
His mother was convicted for identity theft, and there is evidence that Wilson, as a young man, was in the receipt of stolen goods that his mother had obtained through theft and fraud.
That doesn't mean that he's to blame for his mother's crimes.
I want to highlight the fact that there are some interesting similarities in background here between the two people who were involved in this altercation of the shooting.
But you're right, Scott.
You're dealing here with the type of thing that's called creative writing.
And I discern the foul hand of an FOP attorney trying to find ways to play upon presuppositions of the minds of the grand jury.
And this is the sort of thing, once again, that a diligent, conscientious prosecutor would probably not allow to stand unchecked.
We actually had Elisa Day, the assistant prosecutor here, supplying to Wilson certain lines.
You were in fear for your life at this point.
You know, that kind of thing, rather than teasing out of him more specific, less emotionally-laden details.
And there's actually one point where she gently corrected him about a contradiction when he said that Brown supposedly had complete control of his gun.
She actually managed to get Wilson to admit, oh, I never lost control of the gun, but I was afraid that he might obtain complete control of the gun.
Amazing that the grand jury is just eating all this up, too.
So there are larger questions that I'm not even smart enough to formulate, really, about race and power here.
Obviously, the way black people see it in general is that this is a racial thing.
The way I look at it, I'm as terrified of cops as I think any black person should be in this country.
I don't feel any safer than they probably feel.
I don't think anybody should.
Anybody with a Facebook account who has one or two libertarian friends knows that there is an epidemic, that they're killing Mike Browns day in and day out in this country.
And not all black men.
There was the cop that got no billed for shooting the blonde-haired, blue-eyed white girl who was leaving the party drunk.
The cop jumped up on her hood, shot her four times, killed her, and, of course, got away with it.
If she'd been kidnapped in Aruba, we'd have never heard the end of it for seven years.
But when it comes to her versus a cop, her life is worth less than nothing.
So it seems like we're in a position now where the state is just unleashed, out of control.
You know, rabid pit bulls off the chain.
And, of course, black people are getting it the worst.
So to them, it seems like it's the 1950s all over again or something like that.
But meanwhile, this whole society has a real cop problem.
And I don't know, you know, if you want to address the racial part of it so much or if you could answer, what the hell can we do to roll this back?
Well, one of the things people have to understand, we're not talking about black entitlement or white privilege.
We're talking about blue privilege.
We're talking about the embedded privileges that inhere in those who are given license by the state to commit violence on its behalf.
And I've warned about this since August, that what's going to happen is that the relevant issues here are all going to disappear behind a smokescreen of racial antagonism.
That's precisely what's gone on.
People have chosen up sides based on partisan tribalism and, in many instances, a sense of ethnic solidarity.
And in doing so, we're exactly where the power brokers of the state want us to be.
We're at each other's throats.
Yet, eyeing each other with incurable suspicion, even as this machinery describes Scott, is rampaging without stint or limit or apparently without accountability.
And so I would hope that people would set aside issues of melanin and issues of government prescribed identity and examine the question from the perspective of how the law would treat like cases in like circumstances.
And that's why I focus on the idea that citizen Darren Wilson would have been treated completely differently from the way Officer Darren Wilson was treated in this case.
If you're accused of criminal homicide and you're pleading self-defense, you're not going to be treated with the same kind of deference that Darren Wilson has been.
And I hope people have that conversation and examine it from that perspective and start talking in terms of how we reform things with this problem as the chief topic of our discussion.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, the truth of the matter is, well, I mean, there's so many ways to go, but media, social media is changing things.
And I think, you know, as bad as things are, we have come a long way in race relations, not necessarily in terms of the state, but in terms of regular people.
And you see plenty of white people out protesting, you know, with the Ferguson protests around the country.
Yeah, there was a group of them in Utah yesterday.
That's not asking a lot at all either, you know, not like the old days where it was like, wow, some heroic white people out there marching with MLK or something, you know.
Of course they're out there marching right now.
And so anyway, there's a lot of room to grow in the face of crisis and all that.
We can come together and do good, I think.
I certainly hope so.
All right.
You're the best, Will.
Thanks so much for your time on the show.
Take care, Scott.
I'll talk to you later.
Bye bye.
All right, so that is the freedom zealot, Will Grigg.
He is at freedominourtime.blogspot.com, pro libertate.
And read his most recent piece here.
It goes back in time.
It makes a comparison with a case from the 1980s, a very important one.
It's called, Is Disarming a Cop a Capital Offense?freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
We'll be right back.
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