By David French
Monday, August 12, 2019
On Friday afternoon, two of the leading contenders in the
Democratic presidential primary lied. There’s no other fair way to put it. They
flat-out spread fiction, libeled an innocent man, and stoked American divisions
— all for political gain.
Five years ago, a Ferguson, Mo., police officer named
Darren Wilson shot a young black man named Michael Brown to death after an
altercation in the street. False rumors about Brown’s death — namely that he
was shot in cold blood while trying to surrender with his hands in the air —
ignited violent protests in Missouri and revulsion across the United States.
“Hands up, don’t shoot” became a national rallying cry —
until the Obama Department of Justice comprehensively and thoroughly debunked
it in a lengthy
report published on March 4, 2015. Writing in December of the same year,
the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler called the slogan one of “the
biggest Pinocchios of the year.”
But Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren ignored the Obama
DOJ. They blew straight through the facts of the case and published these
accusations:
To demonstrate just how preposterous it is to accuse
Wilson of murder, it’s worth revisiting the actual facts of the case, according
to the best evidence available to the investigators. On August 9, 2014, Michael
Brown and a friend were walking in the middle of the street shortly after Brown
had stolen cigarillos from a local market and shoved away the store clerk when
he tried to intervene.
When Wilson first spotted Brown and his friend, he told
them to walk on the sidewalk. He then realized that they matched the
description of the theft suspects and blocked their path with his vehicle.
Wilson tried to open his door, but it either bounced off
Brown or Brown slammed it shut. Brown then reached into the vehicle and started
punching Wilson. As Wilson fended off the blows, he reached for his gun. Brown
allegedly tried to take the gun from Wilson, and Wilson managed to get a shot
off, injuring Brown in the hand. Eyewitnesses corroborated Wilson’s claims that
Brown was reaching in the car, and these claims were further corroborated by
“bruising on Wilson’s jaw and scratches on his neck, the presence of Brown’s
DNA on Wilson’s collar, shirt, and pants, and Wilson’s DNA on Brown’s palm.”
Brown then started to run away. After a brief pause
Wilson pursued, ordering Brown to stop. Brown then turned back to Wilson and
started running toward him. According to the report, “several witnesses stated
that Brown appeared to pose a physical threat to Wilson as he moved toward
Wilson.” Wilson fired again, striking Brown several times, yet Brown kept
moving toward Wilson until the final shot hit him in the head, killing him.
The report’s conclusion was crystal clear:
Given that Wilson’s account is
corroborated by physical evidence and that his perception of a threat posed by
Brown is corroborated by other eyewitnesses, to include aspects of the
testimony of [Brown’s friend], there is no credible evidence that Wilson
willfully shot Brown as he was attempting to surrender or was otherwise not
posing a threat. [Emphasis added.]
The report flatly declared that Wilson “did not act with
the requisite criminal intent.”
“No credible evidence” is a powerful statement, but if
you read the report, it’s a powerful statement based not just on extensive
forensic evidence but also on the courageous testimony of witnesses who feared
reprisal for speaking the truth. One witness, a 58-year-old black male, told
prosecutors that there were signs in the neighborhood that said “Snitches get
stitches.” Yet he spoke the truth anyway. Other witnesses overcame their fears
and spoke the truth.
How do we have confidence that they spoke the truth?
Because, as the report notes, their statements “have been materially
consistent, are consistent with the physical evidence, and . . . are mutually
corroborative.”
To be sure, there were other witnesses. Some neither
incriminated him nor fully corroborated him. And there was an entire category
of witnesses whose accounts were “inconsistent with the physical and forensic
evidence,” the report noted, adding:
Some of those accounts are
materially inconsistent with that witness’s own prior statements with no
explanation, credible [or] otherwise, as to why those accounts changed over
time. Certain other witnesses who originally stated Brown had his hands up in
surrender recanted their original accounts, admitting that they did not witness
the shooting or parts of it, despite what they initially reported either to
federal or local law enforcement or to the media.
There are few more fraught issues in American public life
than the question of police shootings — especially police shootings of black
men. I’ve written about the issue time and time again and have come to believe
not only that too many American police officers resort to deadly force too
quickly but also that there is an unacceptable pro-police bias in our
criminal-justice system. There is also evidence that race plays a more
malignant role in policing than many of us hoped.
Indeed, while we must of course remember the DOJ’s report
exonerating Darren Wilson, we should also remember that there was a second DOJ
report in 2015 that found systematic misconduct at the Ferguson Police
Department, misconduct that disproportionately affected Ferguson’s black
citizens. I urge you to read both reports, and if you read the second report
with an open mind, you’ll almost certainly come to believe that Ferguson’s black
residents possessed legitimate grievances against their police department.
That’s the complicated nation we inhabit, but the
complexity does not mean there aren’t simple obligations that attach to every
politician, activist, and member of the media. And the simplest of those
obligations is a commitment to the truth. We know that lies and falsehoods can
cause riots. They can cause city blocks to burn. They can destroy a man’s life.
At the very least, they can further embitter an already toxic public discourse.
When issues are most fraught, the obligation of courageous, honest leadership
is most imperative.
But Warren and Harris’s failure is more than a failure of
leadership. The publication of a false accusation of a crime like murder is
libelous under American law. In other words, their lies may well have been
illegal. Democrats — especially Democrats who seek to address the very real
challenges surrounding police violence in the United States — should demand
better. Harris and Warren should do better. They should correct and retract
their false statements. There is no excuse for their inflammatory lies.
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