The Justice Department will not charge Darren Wilson, who resigned from the Ferguson Police Department last year, for his role in the shooting death of Michael Brown. St. Louis County Prosecutor's Office/Getty Images
Darren Wilson will not face federal civil rights charges for shooting and killing unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, the Justice Department announced Wednesday. The agency found in its investigation “no credible evidence that Wilson willfully shot Brown as he was attempting to surrender or was otherwise not posing a threat.”
The bar for bringing federal civil rights charges is much higher than for bringing state criminal charges, which a local grand jury decided in November that Wilson would not face. Justice Department officials had previously suggested that federal charges against Wilson would be unlikely, and Attorney General Eric Holder reiterated in an interview with Politico last week how difficult it is to bring federal civil rights cases.
Holder launched the federal investigation into the shooting in September, after the way Ferguson authorities handled the case and demonstrations in Ferguson attracted national scrutiny. Some protesters have suggested that Wilson's actions were motivated by race, and civil rights groups have been critical of both the shooting and the broader practices of the Ferguson Police Department.
In an 80-page report released Wednesday, the Justice Department detailed the results of the federal investigation, which considered the testimonies of Wilson and other witnesses, as well as forensic evidence at the scene of the shooting and Brown's autopsy results.
“When the shootings are viewed, as they must be, in light of all the surrounding circumstances and what Wilson knew at the time, as established by the credible physical evidence and eyewitness testimony, it was not unreasonable for Wilson to fire on Brown until he stopped moving forward and was clearly subdued,” the report said. Despite the hindsight knowledge that Brown was unarmed, “sufficient credible evidence supports Wilson’s claim that he reasonably perceived Brown to be posing a deadly threat.”
The Justice Department found that Wilson’s actions were not "objectively unreasonable" under the Constitution, given that physical evidence and witness accounts backed up the officer’s claims that Brown reached into the police SUV, punched Wilson and attempted to grab Wilson’s firearm, prompting Wilson to fire his gun. The report did note that some witnesses rebutted this version of events, but said their limited visual view of the shooting undermined their claims.
The report also said physical evidence did not support some witness statements that Wilson shot Brown in the back while Brown was running away, and that many witnesses supported the account that, after a pursuit, Wilson only began shooting Brown when the teenager turned around and moved toward him.
“Even if Wilson was mistaken in his interpretation of Brown’s conduct, the fact that others interpreted that conduct the same way as Wilson precludes a determination that he acted with a bad purpose to disobey the law,” the report said. “The same is true even if Wilson could be said to have acted with poor judgment in the manner in which he first interacted with Brown, or in pursuing Brown after the incident at the SUV. These are matters of policy and procedure that do not rise to the level of a constitutional violation and thus cannot support a criminal prosecution.”
The results of a separate investigation into the practices of local authorities were also officially released Wednesday. The Justice Department found that Ferguson law enforcement, courts and jails engaged in racial bias, which was exacerbated by the municipality's dependence on fines for low-level violations to provide government revenues.
Tierney Sneed is a culture and social issues reporter for U.S. News & World Report. You can follow her on Twitter or reach her at tsneed@usnews.com.
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