Ferguson shooting witnesses purposely fabricated testimony and provided provably wrong statements

(NaturalNews) Though a St. Louis County prosecutor and grand jury have taken heaps of criticism for refusing to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson for shooting a marauding, but unarmed, Michael Brown in August, thousands of pages of testimony from alleged eyewitnesses indicate that many of them either fabricated their accounts or gave demonstrably false statements.

According to The Associated Press, which pored over thousands of pages of records:

Some witnesses said Michael Brown had been shot in the back. Another said he was lying face-down when Officer Darren Wilson finished him off. Still others acknowledged changing their stories to fit published details about the autopsy, or admitted that they didn't see the shooting at all.

Many witness statements are inconsistent with the evidence

The AP review found numerous examples of statements that were made that were inconsistent, provably wrong or outright fabricated. Indeed, the review found, prosecutors "exposed these inconsistencies before the jurors," a tactic that likely influenced the nine whites and three African Americans into deciding against indicting Wilson.

St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch said the grand jury had to consider all testimony that did not coincide with physical evidence and findings, as well as conflicting statements by witnesses as they pondered Wilson's fate.

"Many witnesses to the shooting of Michael Brown made statements inconsistent with other statements they made and also conflicting with the physical evidence. Some were completely refuted by the physical evidence," McCulloch said.

The decision this week to not charge Wilson with any crime touched off violent protests in the St. Louis suburb, as well as in cities around the country, though by far the most damage occurred in Ferguson the night of the announcement.

Since the Aug. 9 shooting, in which Wilson said he was attacked and repeatedly struck by a 300-pound Brown -- even trying to grab the officer's gun at one point, according to his testimony -- supposed eyewitnesses claimed that Brown was attempting to surrender and had his hands up when he was shot. But the forensic evidence did not show that at all, McCulloch has said.

Furthermore, "Brown's death has been followed by months of tension in this majority African American city, and some of the details have become intertwined with what many see as an abuse of power and a symbol of racial inequality in America," the AP report said.

A number of supposed witnesses also claimed that Brown was shot in the back by Wilson, but again, forensic evidence showed that not a single one of the six wounds found on Brown's body entered through his back.

What about perjury?

Other witness accounts were also clearly wrong, the AP reported:

One woman, who said she was smoking a cigarette with a friend nearby, claimed she saw a second police officer in the passenger seat of Wilson's vehicle. When quizzed by a prosecutor, she elaborated: The officer was white, "middle age or young" and in uniform.

She said she was positive there was a second officer -- even though there was not.

Another witness, a woman, said she visualized Brown leaning into Wilson's squad car window "from his navel up," and that his hand was moving up and down, like he was punching the officer. But when she returned to testify again on another day, she told jurors that she suffers from a mental ailment, holds racist viewpoints and that she often cannot distinguish the truth from things she reads online.

Little discussed in the aftermath of St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch's decision not to prosecute was his restraint in not charging any of the witnesses who provided the bogus testimony with perjury, which legal experts including former federal prosecutor and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said McCulloch had the authority to do.

Read the AP report here.

The full AP report containing quoted passages is available here.

Read Wilson's interview with ABC News here.

Sources:

http://bigstory.ap.org

http://www.roanoke.com

http://abcnews.go.com

http://fox2now.com