Mike Brown’s Family Asked To See Robbery Footage Before Police Released It To Media, But Were Ignored
A family lawyer told ABC that the Browns were not shown the video before it was released to the press. Nor were they given the chance to positively identify Michael Brown in the video.
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Lesley McSpadden, right, the mother of 18-year-old Michael Brown, watches as Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., holds up a family picture of himself, his son, top left in photo, and a young child during a news conference Monday, Aug. 11, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo. Michael Brown, 18, was shot and killed in a confrontation with police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo, on Saturday, Aug. 9, 2014.
CREDIT: AP Photo / Jeff Roberson
One of the Brown family’s attorneys told ABC that the family was not shown a surveillance tape of their son allegedly committing a robbery before it was released to the media, nor were they given a chance to positively identify their son in the video.
A week ago on August 9th, an unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking an ongoing wave of confrontations between protesting Ferguson residents and local law enforcement. On Friday, August 15th, Ferguson police released a convenience store surveillance video that purportedly shows Brown engaged in a strong-arm robbery — shoving a clerk to take some cigars from the store — the same day he was killed.
Anthony Grey, a local lawyer in Ferguson, told ABC’s This Week that the Brown family was not shown the video before it was released to the press, even though they had requested “to see any video footage before it was released.” Nor were they given the chance to positively identify Brown in the video.
“They were appalled by it,” Grey told an ABC reporter on Sunday morning. “They saw it for the first time – a glimpse of it — on nationwide TV. They had requested an opportunity, through the attorneys, to see any video footage before it was released. That request was not honored.”
“No one was given the opportunity to authenticate it was Mike Brown Jr. in the video.”
When asked if the family believes it is their son in the video, Grey said “they haven’t examined it for that purpose,” but “there’s no reason not to believe that it’s him.” Another Brown family lawyer, Benjamin Crump, also said the person in the video appears to be Michael Brown.
However, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson also acknowledged the officer who shot Brown did not know he was a suspect in the robbery when he stopped Brown and another young man for “walking down the middle of the street, blocking traffic.” And the release of the footage coincided with the decision by Ferguson law enforcement to release the name of the officer involved in the shooting, after the community had requested that information for days and been denied.
Jackson said he distributed the surveillance tape “because the press asked for it,” and because he couldn’t withhold it indefinitely.
“It’s a diversion, and it’s an attempt to smear Michael’s character,” said Eric Davis, a cousin of Brown’s mother, in reaction to the tape’s release.
Missouri Governor Jay Nixon (D) also told NBC on Sunday that the release of the video was “just not right.” Missouri State Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, who took over operations in Ferguson at Nixon’s request, also said the release of the video in concert with the release of the officer’s name was “not the way that we needed to go.”
Protests and violent confrontations between residents and the police have continued in Ferguson over the week since the shooting. A brief period of calm ensued after Johnson replaced Jackson as the man in charge of police response. But violence and looting flared up again this weekend, possibly due to community response to the release of the video.
Gov. Nixon declared a state of emergency on Saturday afternoon and set a curfew for Ferguson from midnight to 5 am. Groups of protestors have also formed chains at night to protect stores and to discourage other crowds protestors from looting.
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Alabama Lawmaker: Proposed 10 Commandments Monument Has ‘Nothing To Do With Religion’
“The Ten Commandments is a historical document (in this context) and it has nothing to do with religion,” Count Commissioner Tim Guffey said.
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CREDIT: AP
An Alabama lawmaker announced Thursday his desire to erect a monument to the Ten Commandments at a county courthouse, arguing that the religious moral code deserves a memorial for “historical” reasons and that the proposal “has nothing to do with religion.”
Tim Guffey, a Republican county commissioner in Jackson county, Alabama, told AL.com that he would like to create a monument to “historical documents” at a courthouse in downtown Scottsboro. The hypothetical monument would feature the Bible’s Ten Commandments beside reconstructions of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
“What I’m trying to do is erect a monument of historical documents,” Guffey told AL.com. “It’s the Constitution, the Ten Commandments and the Declaration of Independence. I feel like that’s what this country was founded on. These documents helped America become the greatest country in history.”
Guffey did not elaborate as to why the suggested monument wouldn’t include other famous historical legal codes, such as the Code of Hammurabi, the English Magna Carta, the Iroquois Great Law of Peace, or even the U.S. Bill of Rights, all of which have been cited by scholars, U.S. Congress, and even U.S. Presidents as deeply influential to the creation of America’s justice system. Instead, Guffey argued that the Ten Commandments were uniquely important to the construction of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
“The Ten Commandments is a historical document (in this context) and it has nothing to do with religion,” he said. “It shows that these founders had great beliefs in God and the Ten Commandments and His Word and it helped them get to the point where they were. And I feel like taking that document out, if that document wasn’t there to guide them, then our Constitution wouldn’t be what it is today…But I don’t see how I could do the other two and not do that one and be truthful about it.”
Conservatives have long contended that the legal perspective of America’s Founding Fathers was almost exclusively grounded in Christianity, often arguing that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are supposedly inherently “Christian” documents (this despite the fact that Thomas Jefferson, the chief author of the Declaration of Independence, had complex and often deeply ambivalent views on the Bible and religion). But Guffey’s insistence that the Ten Commandments be respected as a historically influential code appears to be part of a new trend among conservatives to appeal to history when introducing explicitly Christian symbols into public spaces. Steve Green, the president of Hobby Lobby, recently developed a four-year curriculum for public high schools that casts the Bible as, among other things, a book that shaped America’s legal framework — including the Declaration of Independence. The curriculum, which has already been approved by an Oklahoma school board, would ostensibly be taught from a secular perspective, but Green said in a April 2013 speech that he hopes the course will teach students that the Bible’s impact, “whether (upon) our government, education, science, art, literature, family … has been good.”
Guffey expressed a similar belief when explaining the rationale behind his potential monument, telling AL.com, “They don’t teach this at school anymore.”
Alabama has a long history of debates over whether or not to display the list of laws said to be handed down by God to Moses in the biblical Exodus story. In 2001, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore erected a Ten Commandments monument in the lobby of the Alabama Judicial Building, a move that ultimately resulted in his removal from office. In addition, members of the Alabama legislature have debated a number of bills in recent years to amend the state’s Constitution and allow for the display of the Ten Commandments on public property. The most recent “Ten Commandments Bill” was introduced in February, passing through the state House of Representatives before halting in the Senate. Lawmakers supported the bill reportedly defended it using a number of bizarre arguments, such as blaming school shootings, patricide, and matricide on society’s failure to display the Ten Commandments in schools and other government buildings.
Update
An earlier version of this piece denoted Thomas Jefferson as the chief author of the U.S. Constitution. Although Jefferson’s ideas undoubtedly influenced the construction of the Constitution, he was actually abroad during the Constitutional Convention, and is more accurately remembered as the architect of the Declaration of Independence.
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