Finally, a version of accounts we can believe in...
Last week was the most charged of the inquest so far with the two firearms officers who killed Jean and the civilian witnesses to the shooting giving evidence for the first time.
As has been widely reported, the two accounts disagreed on a number of key points, most notably whether the police gave Jean a warning before they shot him. The issue over whether a warning was given could be one of the points the jury might consider when deliberating the lawfulness or otherwise of the shooting.
Initially, sitting in court and listening to the firearms officers evidence felt like a welcome relief. The tone initially seemed different from the previous weeks of senior officer after senior officer coming to the Oval and insisting nothing went wrong and that the same thing would happen again. It seemed C12 (the first firearms officer) had a slightly more sensitive approach and that he was aware of what a terrible mistake had been made and what he was responsible for. But it didn’t take long for his evidence and that of C2 (the second firearms officers) to slide into the typical defensive response from police officers involved in a death in custody, failing to have any self awareness and seeking to blame Jean’s death on his own actions. According to them, this seems to pin on Jean’s alleged ‘aggressive’ behaviour of , err, standing up.
As the C12’s evidence went on, the public bit of the court I was sat in descended into a bit of playground. Strangers in the public gallery would start giving each other eye contact with every gasp of disbelief which shortly turned into jest. Despite the gravity of the situation, the 15 odd people in the public court (there were more in the annex) couldn’t help but burst out laughing at some of the claims that were being put forward. Considering the horrific nature of what we were listening to it really was hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
By the time C2 came on the atmosphere changed. His language and tone was so similar to C12’s, sometimes using almost exactly the same phrases and sentences, that the over riding feeling was that of apparent collaboration between the two of them. Indeed, this was was Mike Mansfield put to them, that they got together after the shooting and wrote up their notes together once they knew they had killed an innocent man. Over the years, this has been an ongoing problem in trying to have proper investigations into deaths in custody and only a week earlier the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) agreed to ban such practices.
But later in the week, hearing the civilian witnesses give evidence could not have been more different. As Jean’s mother, Maria Otone, said ‘finally, I have a version of events I can believe in’. The civilian witnesses have given the proceedings a sense of normality. No controlled language, no police or legal jargon, no excuses. Just ordinary people describing what they saw and how they felt. It is hard not to empathise with these poor people who had to witness something so horrific and have had to stay silent for so long. I can only imagine how traumatic it must have been and it must have felt a huge relief to finally be able to say what they saw. Their accounts made Jean seem human and the shooting even more terrible. The way they described Jean Charles looking confused in the seconds before his death, as if he expected someone to tell him what was going on, was incredibly powerful for me. With every tiny detail of the case having been gone over time and time again, it can be easy to forget that in the middle of it all was a man, a real human being, just like these civilian witnesses, just like anyone of us, who probably had no idea what was going on or what was about to happen seconds before he had 7 bullets put in his head by Metropolitan police officers.
Yasmin
J4J Campaign
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This entry was posted
on Sunday, 2 November 2008 at 20:02.
