The problem with leaks from a grand jury deciding whether to charge the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown is that it's not the complete story, says trial lawyer Heather Hanson.
"We're getting bits and pieces of what the grand jury is hearing," Hanson told Ed Berliner on "MidPoint" on
Newsmax TV on Monday.
"The problem with that is that the public is now making assumptions and trying to come to conclusions based on just those bits and pieces," she explained.
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"The grand jury is hearing a whole lot more than what we've heard," she said. "It's on all of that evidence that they're going to have to make their decision of whether or not to indict."
The hard part is that a lot of what the grand jury has to work with are eyewitness reports, "but most of the time the witnesses are going to differ."
"Witness accounts are usually one of the less reliable types of evidence," Hanson said.
"The more reliable types of evidence are the forensic evidence: the gunshot residue, the blood, the various parts of the body that were hit by guns," she explained. "That's the evidence that, if supported by the witnesses, will be telling in this case."
"The witnesses . . . in many ways they've negated one another to such an extent that you might want to throw them all out," she added.
Brown, a young black man, was shot by white police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Missouri, outside St. Louis.
The New York Times reported Wilson's account of the shooting on Friday: that he was held down in his car and was afraid for his life when he shot Brown.
Earlier in October, some of the deliberations from the grand jury were leaked via a Twitter post that said it was looking like there wasn't enough evidence to arrest Wilson. The
grand jury was being investigated for this alleged misconduct.
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