Mike Brown’s killing presented as a human rights abuse case

August 9 will mark the 10-year anniversary of the murder of Mike Brown, the 18-year-old who was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri by a white police officer. Brown’s death—along with the murders of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012, 43-year-old Eric Garner in 2014, and 28-year-old Sandra Bland in 2015––famously galvanized the Black Lives Matter Movement. The apparent arbitrary obliteration of Black people’s lives, with no consequences, stirred community anger and required someone to explain why it happened and deliver some form of punishment. 

Yet Lezley McSpadden, Mike Brown’s mother, never got any satisfactory explanations about her son’s death. St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch failed to get a grand jury to criminally indict Brown’s killer, Ferguson Police Department officer Darren Wilson. After being put on paid leave and never spending one day in jail, Wilson was able to leave the police department and continue on with his life.

Brown’s mother never got a chance to have her day in court, to speak on the record about her son’s killing. That changed her views about the concepts of law and justice. 

On July 10, McSpadden had the opportunity to talk with international lawyers about the killing of her son by taking part in a virtual hearing conducted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the legal arm of the Organization of American States. The IACHR promotes adherence to human rights in the Americas, and the Mike Brown case is the first U.S. police violence case it has ever heard. The petition to hear the case was filed in 2015 by members of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization and Howard University’s Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center. The process took so long that the case is only just now being heard by the commission. 

“We want the case to be reopened, revisited—we want to bring charges against Darren Wilson,” Justin Hansford, the Thurgood Marshall Center’s executive director told the Amsterdam News. “He’s still walking around free, just like George Zimmerman. One thing that a lot of people don’t think about is, when we saw Derek Chauvin [the former Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer who murdered George Floyd] put in jail, that was really an exception.” 

Hansford has been working with McSpadden on getting justice for her son since he was killed. He is a board member of McSpadden’s nonprofit, Michael O.D. Brown We Love Our Sons & Daughters Foundation, and guided McSpadden’s testimony before the IACHR’s legal experts.  

After waiting for St. Louis County to charge Wilson, McSpadden said she was both surprised and frustrated when the prosecutor, McCulloch, declared there was “no probable cause” to indict Officer Wilson. Her son had been unarmed. How could Wilson get away with firing 12 shots, six of which hit Brown, someone who had no weapon and who had reportedly put his hands up in submission? The state had accepted Wilson’s claim that he shot what he’d called the “demon,” “Hulk Hogan”-sized Brown in self-defense.

Missouri failed to press charges, but it was even worse when the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed their own case report in 2015. Initially, McSpadden was given a contact at the DOJ and was encouraged to speak with her. They wound up spending a lot of time together, talking for at least two months about her son and what he had been like as a child and as a brother to his siblings. Then, the DOJ contact called one day and let McSpadden know that they planned to examine Mike’s juvenile record. “I told her, ‘Well Michael doesn’t have a juvenile record,’ and she insisted that well we’re going to look so if there’s something there, you should tell me now. I had no idea what she was talking about,” McSpadden told the IACHR commission.

Two weeks later, her family was given an appointment with the DOJ to hear their conclusions about the case. “When we arrived, they had us wait for an hour and 45 minutes in the lobby and when we went up it was less than five minutes of their time that was taken to let us know that they were not moving forward with charges or a prosecution. I became a little upset because we had waited over 100 days to hear their announcement and then you had us waiting in the lobby for an hour and 45 minutes? 

“I wanted her to give me some more details,” McSpadden said, “She had a large stack of papers in front of her: I wanted her to go through some of those papers and explain to me how they came to this conclusion. She would not do that and in return she said to me that she felt threatened by me and my tone and this let me know that this narrative that had been building about my son was now a part of her biased conclusion. The narrative was to make Mike look like the aggressor and now it was to make Mike’s mother look like the aggressor and never once did I threaten her or get loud with her or get close to her.”

Six IACHR commissioners––judges from six different countries––had the opportunity to question McSpadden and representatives of the United States about the case. The IAHCR’s findings and recommendations to the United States government regarding the Mike Brown case will not technically be binding on the U.S. or McSpadden, but it will be emblematic. A ruling in favor of Mike Brown’s family would give credibility to McSpadden and her efforts to get justice for her son.    

While other nations tend to at least formally follow the IAHCR’s decisions, the U.S. has traditionally not taken direction from international bodies like the IAHCR or the United Nations. Thurgood Marshall Center’s Hansford said he did see the attendance of Kristen Clarke, the DOJ’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, in the virtual meeting as a positive sign. “I think she sees all of the limitations and, you know, we’re still talking about what the Department of Justice might do because Biden’s White House has said that it wants to be responsive to trying to work to accomplish police reform. The George Floyd Justice and Policing Act did not pass, but the Biden White House implemented some sort of executive action, which they talked about in the hearing, along with other things that they were doing about police brutality. 

“But we’re calling for them to reopen the Mike Brown case. We call for that to happen both from the Department of Justice and from Missouri. It’s a murder case; there’s no statute of limitations on it. We could have a special prosecutor appointed, for both the federal case and the state case. And Mike Brown’s mother is really passionate about mental health, especially for families that have been impacted by police violence because she’s seen the way that this has affected her family and herself. She has talked about how she would like to see the creation of a Mike Brown fund, which would allow for victims to get resources for their own recovery, similar to how we have victims’ compensation funds but, you know, those are actually designed to bar anyone who has been injured by a police officer––that only applies when you’re injured by another citizen. We’re trying to find a way to make that one of the remedies and the framework we used was reparations because we know that just arresting and even convicting Darren Wilson won’t really be full justice. We also asked for an apology and for a change in policing regulations. These are all the different things that we put into our brief as possible ways that we could get some justice in this case.”

Plans for the commemoration of the August 9 killing of Mike Brown include a street naming for him in downtown St. Louis, and the possible acquisition of a building that will serve as a community center/museum: a place to memorialize the activist movement that came out of Ferguson following his killing. The new site will also give young people a space where they can learn and engage in community activities.