Grand Juries Work At The Behest Of The Prosecution That Favors The Privilege And Disavows The Average Citizen. In Today’s World Grand Juries Are No Longer Serving The Public And Needs To Be Outlawed. We Amended The Constitution! [Sheriff Ali]
As has been repeated often in recent weeks, a grand jury will indict a proverbial ham sandwich if a prosecutor asks it to. Alternatively, McCulloch could have brought charges through a judicial hearing; he chose not to do that, either.
Ferguson reminds us that we still have a race problem in America. But the face of this problem is not Darren Wilson’s. It’s Bob McCulloch’s.
Wilson, the Missouri police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, is the target of most public ire. But no responsible person thought Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown was premeditated. Even if prosecutors tried him on lesser charges of involuntary manslaughter, they might well have come up empty — and most people would have accepted that result of a fair trial.
What causes the outrage, and the despair, is the joke of a grand-jury proceeding run under the auspices of McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor. In September, I wrote that it appeared he wasn’t even trying to get an indictment; he had a long record of protecting police in such cases, and his decision not to recommend a specific charge to the grand jury essentially guaranteed there would be no indictment.
When McCulloch announced the inevitable result Monday night, he prefaced it by blaming the press and social media for whipping up emotions in the case with inaccurate information. He went on to ridicule witnesses who had given inconsistent testimony. He hid behind the grand jurors, as if he hadn’t orchestrated their decision with the finesse of conductor Christoph Eschenbach: “Anyone suggesting that somehow it’s just not a full and fair process is just unfair to these people” who “gave up their lives” to deliberate.
McCulloch essentially acknowledged that his team was serving as Wilson’s defense lawyers, noting that prosecutors “challenged” and “confronted” witnesses by pointing out previous statements and evidence that discredited their accounts. “Physical evidence does not change because of public pressure or personal agenda,” McCulloch lectured piously. “Physical evidence does not look away as events unfold.”
But physical evidence, like eyewitness testimony, is imperfect and often ambiguous. McCulloch knows this; that’s why he hedged in saying Brown’s wounds were “consistent with a close-range gunshot” and “consistent with his body being bent forward.” McCulloch acknowledged that you could “take out a witness here, a witness there, and come to a different conclusion.” And that’s exactly why we have public trials: to litigate conflicting accounts in a setting where the burden of proof is much higher than the probable-cause standard of the grand jury. [Dana Milbank Washington Post]
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