Darren Wilson Denied Shooting at a Fleeing Suspect Yet Offered a Justification for Doing So

In my

column last week, I noted that the Missouri statute governing
the use of force by police clashes with restrictions imposed by the
U.S. Supreme Court. That issue came up during the deliberations of
the grand jury that rejected criminal charges against Darren
Wilson, and it may have shaped his testimony.

Missouri’s law
allows police to use lethal force if they reasonably believe it
is “immediately necessary” to effect the arrest of someone who has
“committed or attempted to commit a felony.” That’s a remarkably
broad license to kill—broad enough to justify, say, shooting at a
suspected pot dealer who otherwise might get away. In the 1985 case

Tennessee v. Garner, by contrast, the Supreme Court said
shooting at a fleeing suspect is permitted only when he “poses a
threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to
others.”

Assistant St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Kathi Alizadeh
pointed out this conflict to the grand jury. “What we have
discovered,” she
said on November 21, “is that the statute in the State of
Missouri does not comply with the case law.” Alizadeh told the
grand jurors they should therefore disregard the statute and judge
Wilson’s shooting of Brown according to what the Supreme Court has
said the Fourth Amendment requires.

The Court’s ruling in Garner also seems to have been on
Wilson’s mind when he
testified before the grand jury on September 16:

One thing you guys haven’t asked that has been asked of me in
other interviews is, was he a threat, was Michael Brown a threat
when he was running away. People asked why would you chase him if
he was running away now. 

I had already called for assistance. If someone arrives and sees
him running, another officer and goes around the back half of the
apartment complexes and tries to stop him, what would stop him from
doing what he just did to me to him or worse, knowing he has
already done it to one cop. And that was, he still posed a threat,
not only to me, to anybody else that confronted him.

Although Brown was unarmed, he had, by Wilson’s account, just
launched an unprovoked assault on a police officer, hitting him in
the face twice through the window of his patrol car. Wilson said he
feared Brown might hurt someone else he encountered as he was
fleeing. That explanation, which Wilson volunteered to the grand
jury without being asked, closely tracks Garner’s
requirement that a fleeing suspect pose “a threat of serious
physical harm, either to the officer or to others,” before the use
of lethal force can be justified.

That’s a bit puzzling on the face of it, because Wilson
repeatedly denied using lethal force against a fleeing suspect. He
said he fired at Brown in the street only after Brown turned and
charged, at which point he was acting in self-defense. But
according to
PBS NewsHour’s tally, a dozen eyewitnesses said Wilson
fired at Brown while he was running away. One of those witnesses
changed his mind on that point in a subsequent interview, and three
others agreed that Wilson did not fire until Brown turned to face
him. Wilson’s testimony about the threat Brown posed to “anybody
else that confronted him” may have been aimed at assuaging the
concerns of jurors who believed the first set of witnesses.