KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) – A St. Louis federal judge is ordering for the first time the release of unredacted grand jury transcripts in the Ferguson police shooting death of Michael Brown to lawyers for his family.
U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber signed off Monday on an order requiring St. Louis County prosecutors to hand over the testimony and the names of grand jury witnesses to attorneys for Brown’s family pressing a wrongful-death lawsuit.
The grand jury’s November 2014 decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for shooting Brown rekindled sometimes violent protests that immediately followed Brown’s death three months earlier.
At the time of the decision, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch made public heavily redacted transcripts of grand jury testimony. But he didn’t release the witnesses’ names.
