From my reading of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's coverage of grand jury testimony, I gather that in Missouri a police officer is justified in shooting you dead if the officer so much as suspects you of merely attempting to commit a felony while armed--which, furthermore, is a condition that requires no actual weapon, as one might think of a weapon, since your hands, under Missouri law, are considered weapons themselves.
Is a broader standard for the use of deadly force even possible?
But not to worry, since prosecutors in the Brown case didn't fuss much about Missouri's deadly-force law, which is clearly at odds with a relevant Supreme Court decision, which, quoting the Post-Dispatch, "says that an officer using deadly force against a fleeing felon must have probable cause that the felon poses a significant risk of harm to the officer or the community." Ponder this absolutely astonishing portion of the Post-Dispatch's coverage:
[An assistant prosecuting attorney] told [grand jurors] to take the copy of Missouri law that was provided to them at the start of the grand jury process and to fold it in half. "What we have discovered ... is that the statute in Missouri does not comply with the case law" [said the asst. p.a.]. Of the portion that does not conform, she said, "Ignore it totally." When jurors started asking more technical questions, [she] told them just to disregard the statute.
That would be the guiding statute on the use of deadly force, which was the central issue in the Brown shooting. If it's to be "disregarded," then quite literally lawlessness within the law--a rough kind of the-law-is-what-it-is-as-we-make-it-up-on-the-fly--became the grand jury's legal standard. Which is to say, there was no standard under which the grand jury could have indicted, hence the law, or rather the instructed lack of it, was bound to pre-absolve Officer Wilson.
Perhaps he should be absolved. I don't know. But the sort of sloppy, carefree legal amorphousness reported by the Post-Dispatch--Folks, just disregard the statute under which you're to decide on indictment--would not, I should think, have been tolerated by a conscientious judge or competent prosecutor in an adversarial jury trial. In that instance a fuller presentation of the law itself would have been afforded the jury. And that's the point.
As it stands, the Brown family is left to seek justice under federal civil-rights law, since they've been denied a state jury trial. Meanwhile, that denial will rip Ferguson and perhaps other communities apart--which was another consideration the prosecutors seemed not to weigh with much care. That was a huge and exceptionally unpragmatic mistake, since the socio-politics of this case could not be responsibly dismissed. And that, it seems to me, is the supreme point.