The August 2014 police shooting sparked months of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and made the suburb of St. Louis synonymous with a national debate over minority police treatment. The Ferguson riots helped cement the national Black Lives Matter movement that started after Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black man, was shot dead in Florida in 2012.
The theme has come to life again since George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in May after a white police officer pressed his knee to the handcuffed black man’s neck for nearly eight minutes. Ferguson is among the cities around the world that have seen protests since Floyd’s death.
Bell, who took office in January 2019 as a reformist prosecutor who promised to remove the cash bond for nonviolent criminals and increase the use of programs that allow defendants to avoid jail, faced no restrictions on re-examining Brown’s death on possible murder charges. . Wilson was never charged and tried, so double risk was not an issue. There is no statute of limitations on filing murder charges.
The shooting occurred after Wilson told Brown and a friend to get off the street as they walked down the middle of Canfield Drive on a Sunday afternoon. A confrontation occurred between Wilson and Brown, which ended with the fatal shot. Wilson said Brown attacked him threateningly, forcing him to fire his weapon in self-defense.
Brown’s body remained on the street for four hours, angering his family and nearby residents. At first, some people said Brown had his hands up when Wilson shot, although a grand jury and the United States Department of Justice did not find those accounts credible.
Bell’s predecessor, former prosecutor Bob McCulloch, received considerable criticism for taking the case to a grand jury instead of indicting Wilson himself. Critics also accused McCulloch of influencing the grand jury in his decision not to indict Wilson, an accusation he emphatically denied. Wilson resigned days after McCulloch’s announcement on November 24, 2014 that the grand jury would not indict the officer.
The Justice Department also declined to charge Wilson, but released a scathing report citing racial bias in the Ferguson police and courts.
Bell, a former Ferguson councilman, upset McCulloch, a staunch prosecutor of law and order, in the 2018 Democratic primary and appeared without opposition in November. Within days of taking office, Bell took steps to remove three veteran prosecutors, including Kathi Alizadeh, who played a role in presenting evidence to the grand jury in the Ferguson case.
In his campaign to unseat McCulloch, Bell focused on more important criminal justice issues, not McCulloch’s handling of the Wilson investigation.
Bell, who, like McCulloch, is the son of a police officer, said in an interview after the election that he would appoint independent special prosecutors on allegations of wrongdoing by officers. He said he would support the police “200%” as long as they act appropriately. But he said officers who break the law must be held accountable.
Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden asked Republican Governor Mike Parson to reopen the investigation in 2018, saying that Bell’s victory was “a clear mandate from the people of St. Louis to reform the criminal justice system, which begins first. with ensuring justice for my son. ” . “But Parson’s office said it had no legal authority to appoint a special prosecutor.
Calls to reopen Brown’s investigation also came from Justin Hansford, executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Center for Civil Rights. In an August 2019 Washington Post op-ed, he called McCulloch’s expulsion “a sign of hope and change.”
