One can never underestimate the willful stupidity of an American grand jury, but Slate was compelled to point out that Witness #40 was not explicitly presented as a reliable source:
A Smoking Gun piece posted Monday reveals the identity and checkered past of “Witness 40,” who likely lied while testifying to the Darren Wilson grand jury that Michael Brown charged Wilson “like a football player” just before he died. The Smoking Gun writes that Sandra McElroy’s testimony is “baked into the narrative of the Ferguson grand jury”; Gawker covered the Smoking Gun story by describing McElroy as “Darren Wilson’s key witness.” But while McElroy’s “like a football player” line has been repeated a number of times on Fox News, testimony transcripts themselves indicate that it’s unlikely that McElroy’s account was taken seriously by grand jurors…
Indeed, a review of the grand jury documents released by St. Louis County shows that McElroy’s account was questioned openly and extensively by authorities. Grand Jury Volume 15 includes her Oct. 23 testimony in front of the grand jury, as well as a transcript of a recording of an Oct. 22 interview between McElroy and a federal prosecutor that was played for jurors. The federal prosecutor tells McElroy that her account of driving through Ferguson is physically impossible, informs her that her car can’t be found in any images from the scene, solicits an admission that she “used the N-word” online a half-dozen times in relation to Brown’s death, and asks her explicitly if she used media accounts to fabricate parts of her testimony. McElroy speaks about having memory problems in both the recorded interview with the federal prosecutor and the in-person interview in front of the grand jury, and tells both the federal prosecutor and the jury that she suffers from largely untreated bipolar disorder. In McElroy’s Oct. 23 testimony, the grand jury prosecution picks skeptically at her claim to have come across the Wilson-Brown encounter—which did not take place on a main road—after getting lost while trying to find a friend’s apartment. (And, to repeat, the federal prosecutor’s skeptical interview with McElroy was played for grand jurors that day as well.)…
More details at the link. There’s a good argument that Witness #40 had no more business being called in front of the jury than one of my little dogs, but the prosecutors were at least self-protective enough to get the obvious objections to her befuddled phantasies on the permanent record… while, of course, giving Fox News the opportunity to further embroider its HULKING BLACK CRIMINAL ATTACKS narrative.
Adventures in Plausible Deniability: Witness #40Post + Comments (33)
