This week, two liberal writers sympathetic to the view that young black men often get a raw deal from police nonetheless have maintained that Darren Wilson’s fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri may have been justifiable, and that the left shouldn’t try to make the incident fit into a racist-cops-victimizing-innocent-blacks template.
In a Monday article, John Judis of the New Republic remarked that the Ferguson grand jury "did the right thing" by declining to indict Wilson and argued that many lefties reacted to that decision in a manner that "exacerbate[d] racial tensions."
From Judis’s piece, which was headlined “The Ferguson Decision Was Not a ‘Miscarriage of Justice.’ Liberals Need to Accept That.” (emphasis added):
While the grand jury and federal and local investigators received witness testimony that was contradictory…it received physical evidence from autopsy and DNA and hospital reports that wasn’t open to the same kind of questions. This evidence suggested that there were grounds for believing that Brown had scuffled with Wilson in the police car and had even grabbed the officer’s gun. That conformed roughly to Wilson’s own account of what had happened in the police car.
The physical evidence ruled out that Wilson had shot Brown in the back while running away, as Brown’s companion Dorian Johnson initially had claimed. And it was not conclusive one way or the other on whether Brown had, after he turned around to face Wilson, tried to surrender. In all, the forensic evidence did not prove Wilson innocent of killing Brown when he was trying to surrender, but it also did not give the grand [j]ury “probable cause” to indict him on that basis. Other evidence may surface, but from what the grand jury learned, I think it did the right thing, and that it’s also unlikely—given this evidence—that the federal government, which must meet an even higher evidentiary standard, will choose to indict Wilson.
By suggesting that the grand jury did the right thing, I am not exonerating the Ferguson police department, or other police departments. Many police departments are more likely to arrest without good cause or shoot without sufficient provocation a young black male than anyone of another sex or race or ethnic group…I am suggesting that liberals are wrong to characterize the grand jury decision as a “grave miscarriage of justice” or to demand, as Moveon.org has done, that the federal government “arrest and prosecute Officer Darren Wilson.” These kind of charges and petitions only serve to exacerbate racial tensions and to cloud the underlying issues.
Liberals took the decision by the grand jury to symbolize, or stand in for, the greater injustice of the Ferguson and of the American criminal justice department. But in fact the reverse occurred. They projected the larger injustice of the system onto the grand jury’s ruling. In doing so, they suggested that in evaluating the grand jury’s decision, one should ignore the gray, and focus only on the black and white.
On Tuesday, CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, who writes about legal matters for the New Yorker, posted an item along similar lines and wrapped it up with what seemed to be a dig at formerly starry-eyed supporters of Barack Obama:
By concentrating on a single case, protesters must wander into the thicket of evidence around a confrontation on a street in Missouri that lasted about ninety seconds; the facts may well turn out to support Wilson’s version of what happened. That, of course, would not negate the larger point that the protesters are raising about unequal justice in America—but it would be deflating, to say the least. Pinning a cause on a case is like placing your hopes on a leader. It’s inevitable for people to do both, but the case, like the leader, may turn out to be more flawed than anyone expected.
