The woman is the third grand juror to speak anonymously about the September proceedings, joining two others who said the 12-member panel was not given the option to consider charges against the officers who fatally shot
The woman, in her first published interview, told The Associated Press that when the proceedings concluded with three wanton endangerment charges for one officer, she felt herself saying “no, that's not the end of it.”
“I felt like there should've been more charges,” she said in a phone interview. She echoed two other grand jurors' complaints that the panel wasn't allowed to consider additional charges because prosecutors told them the use of force was justified.
Former officer
The officers were serving a narcotics warrant on
The woman on the grand jury said she didn't understand why prosecutors didn't consider endangerment charges against Mattingly and the other officer,
“All of them went in blindly, you really couldn’t see into that lady’s apartment as they explained to us, there was just a TV on," she said of
Hankison was fired in June for his actions during the raid.
Cosgrove, in his testimony to investigators, said the apartment was completely dark and he saw “vivid white flashes” and a "distorted shadowy mass, a figure in front of me.” He fired his handgun 16 times, according to ballistics evidence.
Mattingly, who recovered from a gunshot wound to the leg, said in a media interview last month that
Typically, grand juries meet in secret and the deliberations are kept sealed. But last month, a male grand juror won a court battle to address the public about the secret proceedings. Another male juror came forward soon after.
The woman said she and other jurors were rankled by Cameron's statements after the proceedings, including that grand jurors “agreed” that no other charges were justified.
“I felt like he was trying to throw the blame on somebody else, that he felt like, we as jurors, we weren’t going to (speak) out," she said. “He made it feel like it was all our fault, and it wasn’t.”
Cameron took on the investigation into the police actions on the night of
“The expectation that day was nobody would ever contradict what (Cameron) was saying,” Glogower said. “He was hiding behind the secrecy rule and the history of the grand jury.”
The grand juror said she decided to talk in part because she wanted Palmer to know "we didn’t have anything to do with” the lack of charges on the officers who shot
"I didn’t feel that the family was getting justice,” she said.
© 2020 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved., source