Oscar Grant and his daughter

  On New Year's Day 2009, Bay Area Rapid Transit Police officer Johannes Mehserle shot him while he was lying face down on the platform at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland, CA.  Two officers were restraining him at the time, and later claimed Grant was 'resisting arrest'.  Grant died the next day at Highland Hospital.

    Officers say that they were responding to reports of a 12-person fight on a train car returning form San Francisco; when they arrived, they detained Grant and several others.  Mehserle and his partner arrived soon after.   Six cell phones caught the action that followed; you've probably seen compilations by now.

This one  Rich Siverstein posted at Huffpo claims to show you things you hadn't seen, and change your mind about things you had thought you'd seen, but hadn't; you might want to watch, though I don't agree with all his interpretations.  I give it to you to watch in the name of fair play.

  The Alameda County prosecutor charged Mehserle with murder; the trial venue was changed to downtown Los Angeles, the Judge accepting the defense attorney's complaint that his client couldn't get a fair trial in Alameda County. 

  The trial began on June 10, 2010.  Testimony during the trial was all over the map, of course; you can read the Wiki version here.  Was Grant resisting arrest, was he cuffed, what did he yell, what did Mehserle yell, did he try to knee an officer in the groin or not, what were his hands doing, did they really think he had a gun?

  Mehserle claimed that he didn't mean to shoot him; he thought he was reaching for his Taser.  Check.  His Taser would have been in his left belt pocket; he would have needed to reach across his body to get it.  Here's the Taser X26 no one has proven he even carried that night.  Here's a Sig Sauer P226 he carried; it weighs about twice as much as the Taser.  During the trial, the Judge ruled that he was unconvinced about a possible mix-up.  Mehserle also changed his story about it.  From the Wiki:

"After the seven days of testimony, Judge C. Don Clay concluded that Mehserle had not mistakenly used his service pistol instead of his stun gun. The judge based this on Mehserle's statements to other officers that he thought Grant had a gun. He also noted that Mehserle had held his weapon with both hands when he was trained to use just his left if he was [sic] firing a Taser..   Mehserle faced up to life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder.

   After seven days of testimony, the case went to the jury.  Charges of manslaughter were brought in as possible lesser charges.  But here's the thing: in order for the jury to have convicted Mehserle of voluntary manslaughter, the prosecutor would have had to prove that Mehserle didn't fear for his life in the incident.  The jury convicted him instead of involuntary manslaughter.  Easy to assert 'Black man fear' as a defense.

  Even 'respected' black men admit to the fear:

"If I'm walking down a street in Center City Philadelphia at two in the morning and I hear some footsteps behind me and I turn around and there are a couple of young white dudes behind me, I am probably not going to get very uptight. I'm probably not going to have the same reaction if I turn around and there is the proverbial Black urban youth behind me. Now if I am going to have this reaction--and I'm a Black male who has studied marshal arts for twenty some odd years and can defend myself--I can't help but think that the average white judge in the situation will have a reaction that is ten times more intense."Judge Theodore A. McKee, U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals.(Kennedy 1998:16)

 

 "There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start to think about robbery and then look around and see it's somebody white and feel relieved."-- The Reverend Jesse Jackson. (Kennedy 1998, 16)

  There are lots of issues swirling around this case and the verdict.  I tried to let go of it, but I keep seeing Oscar's face.  So I'm writing about it; not the legalities, of which I know nothing; not even the make-up of the jury, which was kept secret until after the trial (no cameras were allowed in the courtroom; (no blacks were on the jury, but a handful of Hispanics, I believe; you can read about it on the Wiki piece).

  We need to think about a few items that are covered in this piece at raceismreview dot com.  It contains some links to facts and figures on cops and killings and race.

  When you read comments on blogs about the case, and read trial testimony, a common theme pops out:  Oscar Grant as a young black man was on trial as much as Mehserle: his past, his employment, his friends, and the idea that young black man are so scary that officers, even black officers, can over-react (and be excused for it). 

  We all know the figures for cops (both on and off duty) killing young black men; the racismreview piece tells how few cops are ever even charged with a crime for so doing.   

  We also need to think about how seldom juries convict cops (or celebrities for that matter) of crimes: they seem to automatically accept that cops are always the good guys, and resist the idea that cops are human and fallible, and sometimes even de facto executioners.   That's strong talk; but this an opinion piece at this point, and I think it has been the case often enough not to shrink from.

  There was no justice for Oscar Grant.  Or his family, or his four-year-old daughter.

"Oh my God; you shot me!" Grant allegedly yelled.

From the Wiki:

On Friday, July 9, the U.S. Justice Department opened a civil rights case against Mehserle; the federal government can prosecute him independently for the same act under the separate sovereigns exception to double jeopardy. The Department of Justice will be working with the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco and the FBI.

  Some criminal investigators have wondered if this situation would have even required the use of a Taser.  That is another subject that needs plenty of examination and investigation.  There are indications that they are used far too readily, to often disastrous effects; most data is incomplete, and is collected long after tasing events.  Canada is beginning to investigate their use.

  It is somewhat of a miracle that this case came to trial at all; I am grateful for that at least.