After hearing hours of testimony and reading thousands of pages of documents, a grand jury decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge police officer Darren Wilson with murder in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was unarmed.
Their decision, along with the shooting that started everything, led to violent protests in Ferguson, Mo., overnight.
In a televised speech Monday night, the prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, said that the grand jury’s job is to tell the difference between facts and lies. After looking at all the evidence, the grand jury decided that Wilson did not break the law about using force that could kill. At least nine members of the jury had to agree for an indictment to be made.
In a rare move, McCulloch made public the huge amount of evidence that had been given to the grand jury. He did this to put people’s worries about bias to rest. We’re going through the thousands of pages, which include testimony from Wilson and many other witnesses. Throughout the day, we’ll add to this post the pieces that help explain how the jury came to its decision.