Los Angeles Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant Statement regarding former BART officer Johannes Mehserle's "Involuntary Manslaughter" conviction for the brutal shooting of Oscar Grant.

The Coalition believes that Johannes Mehserle (Oscar's killer) should have received a conviction for murder--not for manslaughter.

STATEMENT
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The farce verdict of involuntary manslaughter is a perversion of justice that seeks to absolve Mehserle of all but the most minimal responsibility for murdering Oscar Grant, as if Mehserle ran a light and hit someone rather than pulling his gun and shooting an unarmed man in the back.

We reject the continued official cover-up of the murder of Oscar Grant with a jury exclusive of African Americans, yet including several jurors with police as immediate family, hundreds of miles from the scene of the crime, by a judge notorious for covering police crimes and with slanted rules of evidence.

We remind everyone of the California NAACP request that we should "trust the justice system". The NAACP has contorted itself into accomplice in the cover-up of murder and denial of rights.

Mehserle’s public murder of Oscar Grant is the declaration of open hostility against the people. As it was the people who, through their organized actions, forced Mehserle’s arrest, it will be the people who end the systematic epidemic of police brutality. At the moment we demand of the Obama/Holder Justice Department to file long-overdue Federal Charges of Civil Rights Violations against all involved in the Oscar Grant murder and cover-up. We demand of the United Nations investigation of Human Rights Violations in breach of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. We demand of the people to organize and train themselves, to secure every position, resource, and weapon available for long-term struggle to end police brutality.