Actually, there was nothing to pick and choose here from either A or B because all the main meals on offer in either column were utterly inedible – because the testimonies which went into them and the witnesses who cooked them up were so incredible.
The Framing of Billy Cook
Where does that leave us with regard to Billy Cook and the charge of resisting arrest and aggravated assault? His conviction exclusively relied on testimony on the – undisputed – fact that he was arrested at the crime scene and the testimony of two witnesses who agreed on only one single point: that a Black male, somewhere, somehow, struck the police officer that was killed in the face.
If one strips the whole sequence of events discussed at Cook’s March 29, 1982 murder trial to the barest minimum, three points stick out: (1) The two alleged eyewitnesses described the altercation between Cook and the officer in terms that could not be reconciled with each other. (2) They also described the ensuing shooting of the officer in terms that could not be reconciled with each other. (3) And finally, especially with regard to the shooting and the shooting death of officer Faulkner, these witnesses were as incredible as their contributions to McGill’s “Chinese Menu” were inedible.
So seen from the trial evidence, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that there was no real evidence against Cook. But there are two more hints that would also suggest that he did nothing wrong beyond just being at 13th and Locust at the wrong time, namely, (4) the scenario of a person of Billy Cook’s physical stature – height about 5 feet, 9-10 inch, weight about 160 pounds80 – not only trying, from a very unfavorable position, to strike at physically much larger man,81 but also succeeding in this endeavor, and, closely connected with that latter point, (5) that fact that there was no evidence on Officer Faulkner’s face of any injury he suffered from Cook’s alleged blow.
All the same, as we have seen, he was found guilty.82 Given the analysis above, and given the nature of all the evidence and witnesses, there is scarcely a question that the reasonable doubt standard enshrined in the law was set aside in this case too – just as it was to be later on in the year in the case of his brother Mumia Abu-Jamal.
What was at issue in Cook’s case was of course not the death penalty, but still, at his May 12, 1982 sentencing hearing,83 prosecutor Joseph McGill went out of his way to have Cook sentenced to an actual term in jail instead of probation. He labored mightily to prove that Cook’s alleged hitting of Officer Faulkner had indeed amounted to a variety of “aggravated assault” of the sort that made it imperative to have him locked away as long as possible. The interesting thing here is not this rather unsurprising fact, but the way McGill approached this task.
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