An incredible new development in the Michael Brown killing

Well, at least there's no longer any mystery to why the incident report of the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown has not been released.

He did not write an incident report . . . because his attorney advised him not to, according to some accounts.    Laurence O'Donnell reported this on his 10 pm MSNBC program last night.    

Instead, the St. Louis County police department has released a form, which is used in an incident report.   It includes the victim's name and a few other facts like time of incident, etc.   Usually the officer then gives a narrative description of the incident.  But as O'Donnell pointed out, "there is not one written sentence" on this report form the purports to be the incident report from Officer Darrell Wilson.

Legal experts O'Donnell consulted say this gives Wilson a tremendous strategic advantage.   He can now take all the witness accounts that have been released, as well as interviews in the media, plus autopsy reports -- and then he can construct his own account for the grand jury to conform with what others have said or what objective evidence shows.

As one of O'Donnell's guests put it from his years of experience:   "If there is trouble releasing the report, it's usually because there is trouble with the report."   And that is certainly true in this case.

The other big issue, now that the nightly clashes have ended, is the demand from the community that the Attorney General step aside and turn the prosecution of the case over to an independent special investigator.   The general feeling among the African-American community of Ferguson is that AG Robert McCulloch has a record of not aggressively prosecuting prior cases of white cops shooting unarmed black men.

Beyond that, my main concern from what I've heard is that he does have a major factor that would likely bias him -- and rather than recognizing it as a problem of bias, he considers it a strength and reason that he would not be biased.

McCulloch's own father was a policeman who was killed in the line of duty.    In telling about this during a televised interview, he grew quite emotional, struggling to maintain his composure as he talked about having to watch his mother raise him and his siblings without her husband -- and live out the rest of her life without the man she had married.

McCulloch then says that this gives him a strong motive to stand up for victims of violence.  He therefore thinks it would not bias him to favor the white police officer over the black victim of his shooting.

Perhaps it does give him empathy for victims of violence.   But in his own personal experience, the victim -- his father -- was a white policeman.    Is he then biased in favor of shooting victims -- or in favor of police officers who are at risk in the line of duty?

The kind of bias that is most insidious is that which the person is unaware of and thinks he does not have.

Here are two huge, glaring reasons that the further investigation and prosecution of this case should be moved out of the police department and put in the hands of an independent, special prosecutor.

Ralph