The conventional wisdom is that Darren Wilson is–for now anyway–a free man because St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Bob McCulloch mishandled the grand jury proceedings like a bad-hands wide receiver. But quite possibly the most searing criticism I’ve seen so far came from CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Sunny Hostin. She thinks McCulloch handled Wilson far too gently, and missed a number of opportunities to call out inconsistencies in Wilson’s account of what happened when he killed Michael Brown earlier this summer.
On Tuesday morning’s edition of “CNN Newsroom,” Hostin told host Carol Costello that she’d spent most of the night reading the transcript of Wilson’s grand jury testimony, and found much of it to be “very fanciful.” For one thing, Hostin doesn’t buy Wilson’s claim that Brown attacked him inside his patrol car and went for his gun. Hostin thought that was one of many opportunities McCulloch missed to challenge Wilson’s story. She pointed out that grand jury proceedings are a prosecutor’s first chance to cross-examine a prospective defendant. Instead, she said, they handled Wilson “with such kid gloves.” She was stunned at how many “softballs” that prosecutors lobbed at Wilson.
Hostin also noted that Wilson never provided a statement to police. The only statement of any sort he gave in the month prior to the empaneling of the grand jury was to his own lawyer. As a result, prosecutors didn’t have anything on the record with which to compare his testimony. Even without a prior statement, Hostin thinks prosecutors missed some obvious red flags. For instance, Wilson claimed he saw Brown reaching inside his waistband–but told a grand juror that he really didn’t think about whether Brown had a gun. Additionally, Wilson claimed that Brown punched him so hard that at least twice, he thought the next blow would be fatal. But when Hostin saw the pictures of Wilson’s post-mortem injuries, she concluded–as has nearly everyone else–that “they don’t seem to be consistent with someone 6-foot-6, 300 pounds punching you with full force.”
Later, Hostin pointed out that no witnesses corroborated Wilson’s claim that he told Brown to get on the ground twice. “That’s what officers are trained to say,” she said. All told, Hostin concluded that McCulloch and his prosecutors failed to adequately test Wilson’s account, which she called “highly unusual.” Her overall assessment of Wilson’s testimony was that it was “fanciful and not credible.”
I’d add one more concern of my own to the ones Hostin mentioned. Given the lack of a prior admissible statement, it’s hard to tell one way or the other if Wilson’s story is true–at least for now. But even if you accept Wilson’s account, he still fired at Brown 10 times outside the patrol car. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m finding it very hard to chalk that up to an adrenaline rush. I have to wonder why prosecutors didn’t have Wilson explain why he felt like he needed to fire so many times. If firing 10 shots at someone is reasonable force in Missouri, then that law deserves the same level of infamy as Florida’s “stand your ground” law.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC on Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
