A group purporting to be part of “Anonymous” claims that it has insider information from two independent sources with knowledge of relevant secret internal police communications that Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson will not be indicted in the killing of Michael Brown.
It further reports that this non-indictment is to be made public on or before November 10, 2014, and both regional law enforcement and the Missouri National Guard are being prepared for widespread civil unrest. (A PDF of the post is embedded below, or it you prefer, the Pastebin file is here.)(h/t Gateway Pundit).
I confess to no great familiarity with Anonymous, and I certainly share the expectation that there will be no indictment of Officer Wilson (on what evidence?), but I also feel obliged to note that I find the overall tone of the post to be lacking in credibility.
For one thing, more than half of the post is spent not discussing the evidence on which the Grand Jury might be basing it’s decision–indeed, evidence is not mentioned at all–but rather is devoted to discussion of Wilson personally in the period following the shooting of Mike Brown. Claiming, for example, that he still lives in the area, that he has just closed on a home, that his girlfriend is newly pregnant with their first child, that he has changed his appearance. None of that could have the slightest relevance in the grand jury’s considerations.
They also engage in a personal discussion about the woman known as “Josie” who made a notable call into a talk radio show in defense of Wilson early on the Ferguson kerfuffle, and purport to be continuing to “gather information on this person.” Again, wholly irrelevant to the Grand Jury’s considerations.
Second, they repeatedly refer to the shooting death of Mike Brown as a “murder.” This is simply inflammatory nonsense. Not even the Grand Jury would make that determination, which can be made only following either Wilson pleading guilty to that charge or the jury returning a verdict of guilty on that charge.
With that cautionary and skeptical note, I suppose it’s nevertheless “news,” so here it is:
–-Andrew, @LawSelfDefense
Andrew F. Branca is an MA lawyer and the author of the seminal book “The Law of Self Defense, 2nd Edition,” available at the Law of Self Defense blog (autographed copies available) and Amazon.com (paperback and Kindle). He also holds Law of Self Defense Seminars around the country, and provides free online self-defense law video lectures at the Law of Self Defense Institute and podcasts through iTunes, Stitcher, and elsewhere.
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