By Finbarr Curtis
If Dorian Jackson perpetrated a fraud in his grand jury testimony, he did a remarkably good job. While not all of the details in Jackson's story are clear, someone crafting a self-serving narrative designed to frame a police officer would not usually volunteer that his friend had committed a crime, that they planned to get high, that he had been stopped by police before, that he did not comply with an officer's order, and that both the officer and his friend could not remain calm. Jackson describes a familiar, ordinary confrontation between two human beings, both headstrong, both physically assertive, both feeling disrespected and instinctively suspicious of the other, but only one with the will and the power to initiate and conclude a confrontation with deadly force. An incompetent liar would have told a story with less nuance. We could imagine testimony in which Jackson insisted that Michael Brown did nothing wrong, that a police officer assaulted them without warning and for no comprehensible reason.
In other words, if Jackson was trying to lie he would have told a story like Darren Wilson's. Wilson's testimony has none of Jackson's complexity and ambiguity. His is a simple morality tale of angels and demons, of an innocent baby in the grip of a furious giant. Wilson does not describe an angry encounter between human beings, but instead tells of an inexplicable assault by a mysterious force of diabolical fury.
There is a telling difference in how Wilson and Jackson describe the motives of others in their stories. While Jackson recounts his shock, he does not portray Wilson as extraordinary and unintelligible. According to Jackson, Wilson spoke in the familiar tones of disrespect and infantilization that a condescending father might use when talking to children. Jackson observes that Wilson was not "stopping us or telling us anything like we were committing a crime so much as chastising from a father to a son, like you are doing some wrong. Hey, put that down or don't touch that, it came off like that, that's how he said it." Commanded to get out of the street, Jackson and Brown ignored the order because Wilson did not accuse them of a crime but merely cursed at them in the way that people do when they talk down to others who are less powerful. This was nothing out of the ordinary in Ferguson, Missouri.
