BROWN FAMILY ATTORNEY DISPUTES
D.A. IN ANDREW BROWN POLICE
SHOOTING; NO DEPUTIES CHARGED
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
An attorney for the family of police shooting victim Andrew Brown Jr. disputes the version of events presented by Pasquotank County District Attorney Andrew Womble Tuesday, and hinted at a civil lawsuit down the road since no deputies will be criminally charged.
Atty. Bakari Sellers tweeted Tuesday that contrary to assertions by Womble, Brown, 42, was not using his car as a weapon in his getaway attempt from seven deputies serving him with arrest warrants fo alleged drug dealing at his home on April 21st.
“#Andrew Brown was not using his vehicle as a weapon, Sellers tweeted. The “contact” was minimal at best and initiated by officers.”
No officers will be criminally charged, declared Womble during the Tuesday press conference in Elizabeth City Tuesday. He added that North Carolina law governing the actions of law enforcement officers in the process of serving warrants justified their using their weapons the moment Brown got behind the wheel of his car and decided to drive off.
“[Brown] was beyond law enforcement when multiple shots were fired, including kill shot to the back of the head.,” tweeted Sellers.
Police bodycam video played by Womble at the press conference showed several armed officers surrounding Brown in his vehicle, demanding that he get out immediately. Brown backed his vehicle up. One of the officers grabs for the driver’s side door handle as Brown begins to pull off.
As Brown drives away, shots are fired at his vehicle.
"The decision to flee, which Brown made on his own, quickly escalated the situation from a show of force to an employment of force," Womble said. "That he drove recklessly and endangered the officers is not uncertain. Therefore, I find that Brown's actions and conduct were indeed dangerous by the time of the shooting."
Several reporters during the televised news conference noted that it looked as if Brown was more intent on getting away, than trying to hit any of the armed officers. But Womble insisted that the car could have been stationary, and yet three of the seven armed officers present were legally justified in firing fourteen shots at the car in an attempt to stop Brown.
Atty Seller disagreed.
“Four officers didn’t shoot, didn’t feel life was in danger,” he tweeted.
The tragic incident concluded when Brown, fatally shot in the back of his head, crashed his vehicle across a lot into a tree.
D.A. Womble justified the use of firepower, saying that Brown had a history of resisting arrest.
Womble’s presentation Tuesday was based on the investigation done by the State Bureau of Investigation, as is required during a police shooting in North Carolina. The SBI confirms that Andrew Brown Jr. was not carrying a weapon, but was in possession of drugs.
The April 21st encounter took all of 44 seconds. Brown was already sitting in his car when the seven sheriff’s deputies pulled up in a truck, ordering him to get out of the vehicle.
Womble claims that Brown struck a deputy twice with his vehicle in his escape attempt, thus justifying actions of law enforcement that followed.
Protesters could be heard from outside denouncing Womble’s decision even before the press conference concluded. Elizabeth City has been the scene of angry, yet peaceful protests ever since the killing of Andrew Brown Jr.
Atty Sellers told WRAL-TV that “a civil suit will be filed expeditiously.”
Though Womble “displayed” clips from five of the police bodycams present, he insisted that he could not technically give the family nor the media any of it because of North Carolina law mandating that only the custodian of the videos, in this case the Pasquotank Sheriff’s Dept. could petition the court to do so.
A judge has ruled that he may release the police videos after the SBI investigation was completed, which it is now.
The FBI is conducting a probe or possible civil rights violations.
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HENRY MCCOLLUM
TWO FALSELY CONVICTED BROTHERS
AWARDED $75 MILLION BY
FEDERAL JURY IN RALEIGH
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
A federal jury in Raleigh May 14th awarded $75 million to two African-American half-brothers who were falsely convicted of a 1983 rape and murder of an 11 year-old girl in Red Springs.
Henry McCollum and Leon Brown - both reportedly intellectually-disabled - were awarded $31 million each in compensatory damages, and $13 million in punitive damages.
Both had originally been sentenced to death row after the conclusion of their first trial.
The Robeson County Sheriff’s Dept. settled it’s part of the damages earlier in the day for $9 million. That agency falsely arrested and charged the brothers when they were teenagers for the crimes. DNA evidence eventually proved McCollum and Brown were not guilty 31 years later. They were freed from prison in 2014 when a judge overturned their convictions.
Shortly after, both had received full pardons of innocence from then Gov. Pat McCrory.
The McCollum and Brown case is noteworthy not only because of the large sum in damages awarded to them after so many years, but for why it was so large. Multiple law enforcement agencies pinned the ghastly crime on them based on shoddy evidence, the record shows.
According to attorneys for the pair, the civil rights of McCollum and Brown were violated by the Red Springs Police Dept. the Robeson County Sheriff’s Dept., and the State Bureau of Investigation when the brothers were forced to give coerced false confessions, exculpatory evidence was suppressed, and due process was violated.
Defense attorneys for two SBI agents involved in the case tried to argue to the jury during closing arguments Friday that McCollum and Brown were “rapists and murderers,” but presiding U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle shut them down, noting to the jury that the brothers had already been determined innocent of the crimes.
Over the years, defense attorneys even tried to argue that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, law enforcement did nothing wrong, but to no avail.
The jury took just five hours Friday to determine that McCollum and Brown were then victims of gross injustice.
Now that the brothers are not only free, but properly compensated for their years of anguish and false imprisonment, they will have their finances properly managed by guardians. Their first civil suit attorney, Patrick Megaro of Florida, was found to have stolen a good deal of the $750,000 each in state restitution they had received after they were granted pardons of innocence. That attorney was ordered off of their case in 2018, and made to return $500,000 that he took.
One of the brothers, Leon Brown, resides in a group home for the mentally impaired because of his over three decades in prison.
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GOP LAWMAKERS PASS
LAW AGAINST TEACHING
ABOUT NATION’S RACIST
PAST
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
If Republican-led legislatures indeed have a lot in common, then what happens there can be expected to also happen in North Carolina.
In the Texas House of Representatives, House Bill 4509 will mandate
that “…K-12 school districts an open-enrollment charter schools [would be required to] teach “informed American patriotism” through the founding documents of the United States,…[and] promote understanding of the “fundamental moral principles” of the nation.”
Here in North Carolina, Republican lawmakers pretty much want the same, but they’re going about it a different way.
They want to ban the teaching of anything else but “American patriotism.”
Enter House Bill 324, a measure if passed into law “…would prohibit public schools from promoting the idea that one race or sex is inherently superior to another; an individual is racist, sexist, or oppressive based solely on their own race or sex (consciously or unconsciously); an individual should receive special treatment solely because of his or her race or sex; moral character is determined by race or sex; or based solely on race or sex, an individual bears responsibility for actions taken in the past by members of that same race or sex,” reports the Carolina Journal, the online magazine of the conservative John Locke Foundation.
Indeed, in the aftermath of Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign against North Carolina public schools upgrading their social studies curricula to reflect the realities of this state and nation’s racist past, comes legislation to prevent students from learning more about the 1898 Wilmington race massacre; the destruction of Native-American tribes, and the marginalization of the Asian-American community, among other injustices, by many whites.
“North Carolina’s school children should be taught how to think—not what to think,” said Lt. Gov. Robinson in a statement after HB 324 was passed. Radical leftists complain that this legislation is ‘white-washing history’ and ‘academic apartheid.’ Students should absolutely learn the horrific facts associated with slavery, Jim Crow, and other dark times in our nation’s history. They should not, however, be subjected to pseudo-science social justice initiatives like the ‘1619 Project’ and ‘Critical Race Theory,’ which seek to divide us along racial lines and teach that the systems of our Republic and the history of our great American experiment are shameful.”
Robinson continued, “Our children, regardless of their background, should know that it is their shared and diverse experiences that make America great, and learning about those experiences should bring them together—not drive them apart,” Robinson added. “This legislation ensures that our students will be taught that we all have value, regardless of who we are—or who our ancestors were.”
During tense debate, however, Democrats countered that North Carolin teachers will be prohibited from dealing with racism, and the fact that America was built on it.
“This is an anti-American history bill,” charged Rep. James Gailliard, Black Democratic representative from Nash County.
And it’s not just in the state’s middle and high schools where Republicans and conservatives racism erased off the social studies blackboard.
The recent announcement that UNC-Chapel Hill hired alumna and Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the esteemed “1619 Project,” - the heralded New York Times series that documented how slavery was so crucial to the founding of the United States - to occupy UNC’s Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, was greeted by the right-wing with disdain.
“…Hannah-Jones’s hiring “signals a degradation of journalistic standards,” wrote Shannon Watkins for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (formally known as the conservative Pope Foundation), “which should deter any serious student from applying to the journalism school.”
There can be no doubt that the GOP culture wars are in full effect here in North Carolina - where former Pres. Donald Trump is expected to attend the NC Republican State Convention in Greenville next month - and across the country.
What Democrats do to counter this GOP section to losing the November 2020 election remains to be seen.
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STATE NEWS BRIEFS FOR 05-20-21
TRUMP TO ATTEND NC GOP CONVENTION
[GREENVILLE] For those North Carolinians who haven’t had enough of him, former Pres. Donald Trump will be returning to North Carolina on June 6th to speak at the NC Republican State Convention in Greenville. Observers note that his NC appearance may be part of his expected plan to run for a third time for president in 2024, after losing the 2020 election. However, Trump faces numerous criminal investigations currently, and may be unavailable for that run.
ELIZABETH CITY COUNCILMAN SAYS VIDEO SHOWS DEPUTIES URINATING ON HIS BUSINESS PROPERTY
[ELIZABETH CITY] Gabriel Adkins, an Elizabeth City city councilman, says that he has video of a Pasquotank County sheriff’s deputy urinating on his funeral home property via security camera, and believes it’s in retaliation for Adkins’ protest against the sheriff’s department after the shooting death of Anthony Brown, Jr. on April 21st. Adkins says his security camera caught at least one deputy both last Friday and Saturday nights. He has posted the video on his Facebook page.
NC APPELLATE COURT JUDGE ACCUSED OF TRYING TO HIT PROTESTERS WITH HIS SUV
[FAYETTEVILLE] A Black Lives Matter protester allege that NC Court of Appeals Judge John Tyson tried to hit her and other protesters on the street right outside the Market Place with his SUV on May 7th. Myah Warren has filed charges against Judge Tyson, charging him with assault with a deadly weapon. Fayetteville police are investigating the incident. Judge Tyson has only said that protesters were in the road while he was driving through.
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