MADISON, Wis. (AP) – The story has played out the same way in Ferguson, Missouri, New York City and Milwaukee. A white police officer kills an unarmed black man, sparking waves of protests before a white prosecutor ultimately decides not to file charges or hands the case off to a grand jury.
That narrative looks different in Wisconsin’s capital city, where a liberal biracial prosecutor will decide whether to charge a white officer in an unarmed biracial man’s death.
Black protesters have likened last month’s fatal shooting of 19-year-old Tony Robinson by police officer Matt Kenny to the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York City and Dontre Hamilton in Milwaukee. Grand juries in Ferguson and New York, convened by white prosecutors, chose not to charge the officers in those cases. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, who is white, declined to file charges in the Hamilton shooting.
The decision to press charges in the Madison case will be made by Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, a biracial Democrat who identifies as black.
Ozanne, whose mother was an activist in the South during the Freedom Summer of 1964, got his start as an assistant Dane County district attorney in 1998. Ten years later, then-Gov. Jim Doyle chose Ozanne to help lead the state Department of Corrections, where he helped implement Doyle’s early release program.