There are just a few big facts that are known. The first is that police went to the wrong address to serve a warrant. The address on the warrant was correct but, for reasons unknown, the cops showed at the wrong house. They showed up at Ismael Lopez’s house. And there was no reason for Lopez to expect police at his door, putting him on the wrong side of the Good Guy Curve.

The second big fact is that a cop fired at Lopez, killing him with a bullet to the back of his head. They alleged he came to the door with a gun and started shooting. There is no evidence to support this, and his wife denies that he had a gun when he went to the door, that he fired, that the cops announced themselves or told him to drop a gun.

And the third big fact is that the District Attorney, John Champion, presented the case to a grand jury, and they returned no true bill.

District Attorney John Champion said he took the case to a grand jury in an effort to indict the officers on homicide charges. Champion failed to get the grand jury to return an indictment.

“The grand jury was given all of the evidence and they decided not to indict,” Champion said. “From my perspective, the case is closed at this point.”

There is no information upon which to base a discrete challenge to the handling of this presentment. Yet, former New York Chief Judge Sol Wachtler’s words echo:

If a district attorney wanted, a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.

Much as the historical value and purpose of a grand jury are raised as a safeguard against governmental oppression, the reality is that it’s an ex parte proceeding, just the DA and the grand jurors, hearsay is permitted and, well, it’s just not hard. In fact, when a grand jury fails to return an indictment, it’s almost invariably one of two things. Either the case is that utterly awful, so barren of basis or outrageously bad, that not even the most compliant possible group can indict, or the DA ditched the indictment.

There is nothing here to point to that proves Champion sabotaged his case, except that the case wasn’t barren of basis. Indeed, it was a slam dunk: dead man, no weapon, bullet to the back of the head. And yet the grand jury “declined” to indict.

Champion said the autopsy that he received in June 2018 was poorly done. He briefly talked about the ongoing problem of delayed autopsies in Mississippi, and he implied that Lopez’s autopsy was not thorough.

He said most autopsies are 10 or more pages, but Lopez’s autopsy was just two or three pages.

“There’s nothing in it honestly,” Champion said.

Bad autopsies are a blight in Mississippi. If you want to understand why, Radley Balko has been explaining why for years, culminating in his latest book, The Cadaver King and The Country Dentist. But as inadequate as this autopsy may have been, it provided the two details necessary in this instance. Ismael Lopez was dead of a bullet, and the kill shot was to the back of his head. Had the autopsy contained nothing more than that, it would have been sufficient for an indictment.

To the extent there was a factual dispute as to what happened at the wrong house, a house where a guy who had done nothing wrong came to his door to see who was there, with no reason to anticipate that he would be met by police with guns drawn, Champion’s position isn’t entirely clear. On the one hand:

“I do not believe [the officers] identified themselves at the door,” Champion said.

Yet, on the other hand:

Champion said Lopez was pulling the gun away from the direction of the officers when the officers opened fire. He said he did not want to speculate about how it happened, but he thought Lopez could have been shot in the back of the head while he turned away from the officers.

According to Lopez’s lawyers, there was a rifle in the house but he didn’t bring it to the door. His wife says he was unarmed. What Champion means by “pulling the gun away” suggests he believes Lopez was armed, if not pointing a weapon at the police or shooting. A video would have settled the claims, but there was none.

Champion said there was no body camera or dash camera video from the incident.

Were the cops wearing body cams? Was there a dash cam? If so, why was there no video? If they were executing a warrant on a potentially dangerous person, embarking on a volatile situation, there’s no explanation for failure to have video running, to capture what might transpire. But there was none, nor any explanation for why there was none.

The routine answer to the murder of Ismael Lopez is that the shooter must have believed his life was threatened or he wouldn’t have shot. After all, why would a random police officer shoot and kill a random person otherwise? There was no personal animosity here, no other explanation but that he felt like his life was in danger. Cops just don’t kill for the hell of it, right?

Putting aside the reality that, sometimes, rarely but sometimes, they do, even the best case scenario for the shooter of Ismael Lopez fails. David French offers a gentle rebuke for what can only be described as cowardice, the irrational fear that grips a cop and compels him to shoot in anticipation of a threat that doesn’t exist or remains far too attenuated to justify the use of deadly force. This is captured in the “Reasonably Scared Cop Rule,” as discussed many times here and elsewhere, that allows cops to kill under the pretext of fear that only exists in the fertile imagination of the shooter and his apologists.

But that’s a trial defense. Here, the officer wasn’t even indicted. There is no good explanation for the grand jury’s failure to indict.