Claim: Police Confirm Darren Wilson Suffered a Fractured Eyesocket In Confrontation With Michael Brown?

So says The Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, citing two (unnamed) police.

I don't know. This seems like such a crucial thing, so important to determining what happened in that encounter -- it's hard to argue with the written record of broken bone -- it's perplexing to me that this is being withheld, if true.

I'd be shouting it from the mountaintops, were I part of the SLPD.

I can sort of understand why the below might be kept quiet:

With passions running so very hot, I wouldn't want to put out the word that some locals are undermining the narrative. I wouldn't want people looking for locals and encouraging them to change their stories.

But a fractured orbital of the eye? To explain this away one would have to propose that, post-encounter, Darren Wilson had another cop punch him hard enough in the eye to break bone. Possible, maybe, but certainly not the kind of thing that most people are going to believe as a likely theory.

So why is that being kept quiet?

I sort of doubt this. I don't doubt that Jim Hoft has the sources he says he has; I just wonder if his sources have the story garbled due to telephone-game loss of signal.

It just seems like a nearly dispositive piece of evidence I can't fathom why it would be kept under wraps.

Retracted: The reporter who tweeted out that 12 witnesses confirmed the cops' accounting of events has now retracted her tweet -- and announced that she's currently on a Family and Medical Leave Act departure from work.

@ChristineDByers

On FMLA from paper. Earlier tweets did not meet standards for publication.

What?

Does she mean she was already on a FMLA leave of absence when she first tweeted, or does she mean that she went on a FMLA sabbatical after tweeting this claim?

Answered! By Tami.

The reporter has been on maternity leave since March, and she's not covering the Ferguson protests for the Post-Dispatch. She's been tweeting on her own.

So this could mean something like "she is not with the paper at the moment, and did not go through proper channels (clearing it with an editor) before publishing."

And so she might not mean her report is untrue, just that the report should not be associated with her newspaper, as she was not acting as a reporter for that paper when she tweeted.

But if it's true, surely we'll see the paper itself, with current employees, following it up.

Fathoming: Yesterday Krakatoa suggested, and today several commenters suggest, that information is being held back because Darren Wilson's chief interest is in being exonerated at trial, or at a grand jury hearing, and therefore evidence helpful to him is being held until such time as it is needed for that purpose.

I confess here that I am, of course, completely ignorant of typical procedure in these sorts of cases (and, indeed, in almost all other sorts of cases as well).

I can't say "That's wrong." I don't know.

However, it does still seem to me that during this period of hypothesized withholding, narratives are being set, such narratives impacting the minds of potential jurors, and causing political pressure to fall upon politicians, who are are of course cowardly and unprincipled creatures, to indict and arrest Mr. Wilson.

And the longer such evidence is held back, the more loudly those who wish to imprison (or worse) Mr. Wilson are going to shout, "Well if that's true why did it take you so long to say so? You've had ten days to fake up X-rays and pictures...!"

And so on.

Now, the people inclined to say stuff like that would have said the same thing if the information had been disclosed within six hours, true, but more people will be willing to credit conspiracy theories as credible due to a delay in disclosing the evidence.

So I'm having trouble understanding how withholding evidence (which seems to me to be virtually dispositive) actually aids Mr. Wilson. Withholding such evidence seems, again, just to me, to compromise his position, rather than strengthening it in a later proceeding.

But I don't know. I have doubts on this claim, which is not nearly the same as saying I'm confident that the claim is erroneous.

posted by Ace at 03:18 PM

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