State Justice Failed Michael Brown. People’s Justice is Just Getting Started. on Feed 44

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “State Justice Failed Michael Brown. People’s Justice is Just Getting Started.” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

The consequences for cops who draw public attention due to their extreme levels of brutality, in this new age of citizen journalism, is instructive. The people are more than happy to administer justice when the state’s courts refuse to. Despite his release from prison, Johannes Mehserle — the murderer of Oscar Grant in Oakland — is regularly recognized and ostracized, sometimes leaving public establishments in shame when noticed by the decent people around him. Lt. John Pike, infamous for pepper spraying peaceful UC Davis students as they sat quietly on the ground, wound up retiring on disability with a nervous breakdown from the public hostility he experienced daily.

As I wrote of Pike in 2011, Wilson will probably spend the rest of his life afraid to leave his house. He’s hardly begun to grasp the hell the rest of his life is going to be. His phone number, email address and street address soon will be (if they aren’t already) widely publicized. Even if he isn’t discharged from the Ferguson police force, whenever he encounters a citizen in the course of his duties he’ll wonder if that’s a sneer of contempt or just his imagination. Every time he deals with a server or cashier, or meets anyone new, he’ll see that brief look of recognition followed by a frozen mask of politely suppressed revulsion.

He can run, but he can’t hide.

Feed 44:

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