A New Series of Posts: Reading the Darren Wilson Transcript (Intro)

Here at Allergic to Bull, I don’t typically chase around breaking news.  I don’t try to give you a digest of all the day’s news.  There are many other blogs that do that.  What I try to do is give you an in-depth perspective on whatever randomly interests me, often including something related to current events.  I try to bring a fresh perspective and I try to dig in deep.  A friend, Becca Lower, complained that she didn’t have time to read my material at work and that is sort of the idea.  This is a site you “pick up” when you want to chew on something larger, maybe over a meal, or just before bed.  Maybe you want to read one interesting piece over lunch and so you go to my site.  Stuff like that.

Anyway, last night we learned that a Grand Jury is not going to indict Darren Wilson, which I live-blogged, here.  Riots sprung up immediately afterward, with sad predictability.  And Wilson still faces potential legal challenges.  The Feds are still looking into Civil Rights charges, although that possibility seems remote.  And of course Wilson can be sued for it, too, but I am not sure that will happen.  Judging by what I have seen about the Browns, I doubt that they can afford a long lawsuit—really, bluntly, most people can’t.  Given the failure to even indict, few lawyers looking at this purely from the standpoint of the odds of victory would be likely to operate on a contingency fee.  I could see it being either pro-bono, or “semi-pro-bono” with the possibility of being paid from contingency fees, if a lawyer sees it as a way to become more prominent.  But that seems like the only likely way to see a suit filed, and even then, the fact Wilson won before the Grand Jury suggests he would win before a civil jury, too.

Oh, and here is one other thought.  I wonder if Wilson is thinking of defamation suits against any of the people who made false statements about him?  There is unlikely to be a civil cause of action for perjury in Missouri, but false statements outside of court that harm a person’s reputation is typically handled as defamation.  So if someone said publicly that Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in the back as he lay on the ground, and it turns out that wasn’t true, Wilson might have a cause of action against that person—although there is still the difficulty of proving that damage was caused by it.

But, missing from all of that analysis is the vital question: was the Grand Jury correct?  Up until now I have ducked the question of Wilson’s guilt or innocence because I haven’t seen the evidence.  I mean that is elementary—don’t judge until you see the evidence (although I tend to trust juries and I presume they usually get it right).  But now we have the evidence.  All of it has been released.  The transcript of the Grand Jury proceedings alone is 4799 pages.  And there are photos, etc.  So I will be reading through that monstrous thing with an eye toward figuring out: is Wilson guilty of any crime, and should he have been indicted?

BREAKING: NO INDICTMENT FOR DARREN WILSON!!! (Update: Rioting, Transcript)

Update (VIII): NO INDICTMENT!!!

In his statement prosecutor McCulloch stressed how much witnesses were caught contradicting prior statements--or the physical evidence.  I.e., lying.

McCulloch notes that there was no question Wilson shot Brown, but the issue was whether it was lawful self-defense.  No mention of right to shoot to apprehend, which is something I mentioned in a previous post.  (Please note that I will be updating parts of this live without making a separate notation.  Basically I am live-blogging this.  Live with it.)

Particularly striking is McCulloch mentioning that several witnesses claimed that Wilson shot Brown in the back, on the ground, which was utterly disproven by forensic evidence.

It is interesting that they don't seem to discuss the right of a cop to shoot to apprehend.  And McColloch reasonably relies significantly on physical evidence because, well... it doesn't lie.  And it sounds like a lot of people were lying to them.  Terrible, if true.

McColloch promises to release some of the evidence later.  He speaks extensively about finding blood in the car, suggesting that there was a struggle in car.  Wound previously reported on Brown's thumb verified.  Wilson also had some swelling on face.  Claim that his eye socket was broken not verified.

McColloch has basically verified every single rumor heard about the autopsy I have heard.  It sounds like Brown was charging Wilson when the final shooting.  And he mentions the video chat that captured all of it.  Says that the evidence and the testimony will be released after this decision.

McColloch can't tell us what the vote break down was by statute.  And they asked if they might go after them for perjury--rules it out.

McColloch, in response to reporter notes that most of the testimony he referred to specifically was from black witnesses.  It used to be a law in many Southern States that a black person cannot testify without a white person testifying first that this person can be trusted.  In this case the rule seems to be reversed: Wilson is not innocent unless a black person can vouch for him.  We are not yet at the point of colorblind justice, unfortunately.

Statement from the Brown family, according to a reasonably reliable source:

Statement from #MichaelBrown family regarding #DarrenWilson ruling pic.twitter.com/vpmJrJIFLO
— Seni Tienabeso (@SeniABC) November 25, 2014

Idiot reporter claims that the law does not value the lives of kids like Michael Brown.  The law only ceased to value his life, to the extent it did, when he apparently attacked a cop.

McColloch says the federal investigation is ongoing.  But I told you already that they don't seem likely according to rumors and this outcome suggests it is unlikely.

And the conference is over.  So the live blogging will shut down for now.  Actually no, I am still frequently updating.

(Title change, original title placed after updates, all after the break)

Update (IX): Via Mediaite, we get significant anger from the media from what I saw as a pretty mild description of the realities of a high-profile case.

You can also see video from the announcement at the Mediaite link.

Also statement from the Wilson camp:

NEW: Statement from Darren Wilson's defense team #FergusonDecision pic.twitter.com/UbhxAqrdvM
— ABC News (@ABC) November 25, 2014

Some reports of possible shots fired.  One store window broken with a trash can, other chaos.  Not sure you call it a riot, yet, but it is close.

Confirmed: Some protesters are throwing D batteries at police officers in #Ferguson near the police department.
— St. Louis County PD (@stlcountypd) November 25, 2014

Obama just finished making a statement that didn't really have much to report on, there.  It is interesting that he blamed the media, too.

Also, this:

Obama: "We are a nation built on the rule of law [except when I want to change anything]."
— Leslie (@LADowd) November 25, 2014

Seriously.  Also this:

#Ferguson RT @gdthomp01: The juxtaposition is pretty surreal on this dual image during Obama's speech. pic.twitter.com/0Kzde1NBap
— Stacey-SisterToldjah (@sistertoldjah) November 25, 2014

And this, too:

Brown family atty: "Michael Brown's justice will have to come in a different form of justice. Our system offers different forms of justice."
— Leslie (@LADowd) November 25, 2014

As I told her, a civil suit seems like a losing proposition, now.  As I have said before, the standard of proof to indict is very low.  If you can't get that, you probably can't win a civil suit, although collateral estoppel will not apply.  Of course the question is, who eats the legal fees?  I suspect that no lawyer will offer a contingency fee.  And I am not sure Brown's family can afford a suit.  So unless it is taken on pro-bono, I don't think it is financially viable.  One reader brought up 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983, which deals with civil rights violations.  They can get past a motion to dismiss on that if the complaint is competently written, but the winner get back attorneys' fees, which means if they lose, the Brown family might end up owing Wilson money.

I will add that it looks like it is officially a riot.  Sigh.  I hate being right, sometimes.

Finally, I am trying to track down the actual evidence released tonight.  The prosecutor's site is down (hacking? high demand?).  If you find it, tweet or email me asap.

Update (X): Found a transcript.  Haven't looked at it, but it is embedded below the fold. If you find more, tell me.  Update: It is too large to post to scribd.  Sorry, if you came here for that.  You can read it on the NYT website, here.  And now, this site is uploading fully searchable versions.  I will have my own version to look through, and if I find it interesting enough, I might write a post or twenty on it.

I might attempt to split it up and embed it.

The Elephant in the Room in the Cosby Rape Accusations: There is One Issue in the Story No One Seems to Address

Let me start off by confessing my biases.  I fully admit I don’t want the Bill Cosby rape story to be true.  As I said on Twitter, I feel exactly the same way I would if I heard the accusation leveled against a beloved grandfather.

I will add that one of the problems with this story is that it doesn’t really fit into what we know about Cosby, or into questions hanging out there.  Let me give you a practical example of what I mean by that.  Take the allegations of pedophilia against Michael Jackson.  I don’t know about you, but when I first heard of them, my response wasn’t “this doesn’t make sense!”  It was to realize how much of Jackson’s odd behavior suddenly did make sense when you hypothesized that he was a pedophile, especially just about everything about Neverland Valley Ranch.  I still am not sure if he was a pedophile, but it’s not very hard for me to believe that about him.

By comparison, there is little that this Cosby story would fit into, so...  there is that problem.

But as much as I didn’t want to believe, I figured I was obligated to really look at it and, honestly, right now I don’t know what to think.  Particularly this morning I sat down and took the time to read this excellent piece in the Washington Post on the subject.  It is well researched and correctly leaves it to the reader to decide.

But here’s my major problem with it.  It is not talking about the elephant in the room: the touchy history of black men and white women.  Consider this your “trigger warning” if you are the type who needs that sort of thing.  If you don’t like discussions about some of the really screwed up problems with racism, put this piece down now.

Grubergate Proves that Citizens United Was Correctly Decided

So in 2010 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of free speech in Citizens United v. FEC.  You can read that decision, here, and my early blog post praising the decision is here.  That old post really has stood the test of time.

One of the arguments made by the dissent went as follows: sure, some corporations had free speech rights: the news corporations!  But, according to the dissent no one else had this right.  They based it on an interpretation of the free press clause where, to them, in that sentence “press” referred to “the institutional press.”

As I pointed out at the time, that was a ridiculously constrained reading of that clause.  Freedom of the press was freedom of expression in the written word.  That’s all.  It protected the New York Times, but it also protected the crank pamphleteer on the street corner.  Any other reading would have the court declare that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was not protected expression, an outcome the founders obviously never intended.

I would add that such a ruling would also allow the government to regulate many other forms of corporate speech.  Is the Daily Show considered part of the institutional press?  If you were John Stewart, would you want to take the gamble that the courts would say it was?  And certainly there are other comedians besides Stewart who 1) engage in corporate speech, and 2) talk about politics, without seeming to count as the “institutional press.”  One obvious example is Dennis Miller, who recently made a comedy special called “Dennis Miller: America 180.”  I watched it, and basically it was Dennis doing pretty much what you expect from him, standard stand up material mixed with jokes about the news, the only difference being how conservative he had become compared to past years.  Would this be considered protected speech if only the institutional press is protected by the free press clause.  Could a corporation, in this case Epix, be allowed to pay him to engage in that speech if the dissenters won in Citizens United?  If the only corporations that can express themselves freely are the institutional press, and only the institutional press, it is hard to see how Mr. Miller’s speech would be protected, in such a regime.  Or Bill Maher’s HBO show.  Or the ladies on The View...  You get the idea.

The Tea Leaves Seem to Say Darren Wilson Won’t Be Indicted

Now let me start by saying that the merits of the Darren Wilson/Mike Brown case will not be discussed.  I already discussed the applicable law, here, and the evidence is pretty much all over the place.  The only thing to add is that the legal standard is probable cause.  Black’s Law Dictionary (6^th Edition, if you are playing along at home) defines that as:

Reasonable cause; having more evidence for than against. A reasonable ground for belief in certain alleged facts.  A set of probabilities grounded in the factual and practical considerations which govern the decisions of reasonable and prudent persons and more than a mere suspicion but less than the quantum of evidence required for conviction.

It is a low standard, especially given that the accused has no right to defend himself—although bluntly, if I was on a Grand Jury, I would at least want to hear the accused side of the story.  There are some who think that the Grand Jury can’t call its own witnesses—that they can only hear what the prosecutor puts in front of him, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.  Still, it is often said that a Grand Jury will indict a ham sandwich.

Anyway, besides rumors to the effect that there won’t be an indictment (here and here) we are seeing other indicia that an indictment won’t occur.  First, you have this little tidbit:

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard Monday afternoon ahead of a grand jury decision on whether to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

Obama Grubers Illegal Immigrants

Funny fact.  On Wednesday afternoon, Becca Lower called me and told me that Obama was going to make a speech on immigration and, hint, hint, Aaron you should write a post on his plan.  I confessed to her at that time why I hadn’t: I didn’t feel confident I knew what the plan was, yet.

Well, now we more or less do.  Here is his speech, last night:

A Letter to Baltimore School of Law

This will be an email to officials at Baltimore Law School I will send after enough time for the peanut gallery to point out any mistakes.

Dear Sir or Madam,

My name is Aaron Walker.  I am an attorney and a graduate of Yale Law School.  I say this not to brag but to make you understand that I am not simply a crank.  I know of which I speak.

Recently one of your professors, Garrett Epps wrote a piece in the Atlantic entitled “Imperfect Union: The Constitution Didn't Foresee Divided Government” that argued, remarkably, when discussing the likely confrontations between the President and the newly-Republican Congress:

What’s coming will be painful, frustrating, and dangerous—and it will illustrate a constitutional malfunction unforeseen in 1787. The country will survive, and it’s possible it can even make progress—but at tremendous cost in polarization and missed opportunity. The country is like a car driving with the handbrake on: Any movement forward will be accompanied by smoke and internal damage.

So we might profitably put a six-month moratorium on paeans to the wisdom of the Framers. The problem of divided government is a bug, not a feature, and the Constitution itself provides no guidance on how to work around it.

Obama Says He Stole Liberally From Gruber

This is admittedly not quite as damning as the video I put in the update to this post, but it’s one more drip-drip-drip of evidence that this many openly contemptuous of the American people was one of the key architects of Obamacare.  And while from a legal standpoint his comments are irrelevant to the King case coming up, it is increasingly becoming a political problem for the Democrats and this is only the latest example:

Congressional Democrats: Accommodations Only Have to be Provided By the Little People

I have said for some time there is an undercurrent of hostility toward the disabled in the Democratic party.  For instance, when Wendy Davis ran an ad last month featuring an empty wheelchair...

BREAKING: Newly-Discovered Video of Obamacare’s Architect Looking Down on Average Voters (Update: Another Video)

Update: Jump to the end for a new video linking Obama to Gruber’s deceptions.

Another day, another Gruber video drops where he demonstrates what a complete snot he is.  As I said previously on #Grubergate, the man has a fundamental distaste for Democracy, and the #Grubergate chorus has gotten loud enough to force Obama to talk about it.  Via Hot Air:

When asked directly if he or his administration had, as Gruber insisted, intentionally misled the public and oversight organizations like the Congressional Budget Office when they crafted the Accordable Care Act, Obama’s reply was terse and direct. “No,” he said. “I did not.”

Obama was joined on Sunday by Health and Human Services Sec. Sylvia Burwell who appeared on Meet the Press to distance herself and the administration from Gruber.

“I have to start with how fundamentally I disagree with his comments about the bill and about the American people,” she began emphatically.

Do read the whole thing, but, dear reader, you are looking at the website of a Google ninja.  Just as the now-famous Rich Weinstein, a.k.a. @phillyrich1 went through publicly available videos and found the video that kicked off Grubergate, I have found another video previously available that also proves just how much the architect of Obamacare looks down on ordinary Americans, which I will share with you after the break.