In response to my earlier post about the grand jury in the Michael Brown case, Jack Marshall posted a lengthy comment. Events have somewhat overtaken that post, but I wanted to address a few points Jack makes. (He wrote his comment before the grand jury decision came out.)
I don’t find the fact that a prosecutor could get an indictment probative of whether he should get one, not at all. The special prosecutor in Florida, for example, indicted Zimmerman with nothing that would support a conviction. That’s not serving justice.
Funny you should mention Zimmerman, because prosecutor Angela Corey only charged Zimmerman with a crime after caving in to public pressure to do so. Initially, prosecutors chose not to charge Zimmerman at all. If Bob McCulloch thought Darren Wilson’s shooting of Mike Brown was justified, there was no need to present anything to the grand jury.
If there were conflicting witnesses, it would be lousy practice to merely put on Johnson, about as biased a witness as one could find.
After Darren Wilson. But point taken.
The fact that there were six shots fired isn’t indicative of anything. Police are trained to fire until a subject is down.
I agree with Jack’s point about police tactics. Some time ago, police departments noticed there had been a number of incidents in which an officer fired a shot at an attacker which either missed completely or didn’t stop him quickly enough to prevent him from injuring or killing the officer. So modern police training tends to emphasize shooting until the attacker goes down.
This means that the number of shots fired is not necessarily indicative of maliciousness, anger, or race hatred. It’s just training. However, the number of shots is indicative of intent. One shot could be an accident. Six shots are on purpose.
Or to look at it another way, instead of a white cop shooting an unarmed black teen, imagine that it was just two white dudes from Missouri, Vern and Earl, who ran into each other on the streets one day. Somehow Vern ended up drawing his gun and shooting Earl to death, and it turns out Earl was unarmed, and some of the witnesses describe Vern shooting him in cold blood. In that case, don’t you think the prosecutor would make sure the grand jury heard that Vern shot Earl six times?
Why would a prosecutor want to indict a police officer if the evidence showed that he was in legitimate fear of his life and fired in self defense?
If that’s what the prosecutor thought the evidence showed, why would he present evidence to the grand jury at all?
Why would you assume that if the prosecutor is presenting the evidence fairly, he doesn’t want an indictment?
Because that’s not what prosecutors do when they want an indictment. The grand jury process isn’t “fair” in the same sense that a trial is, and it’s not intended to be. There’s no presumption of innocence, no way for the defense to contest the admission of evidence, no way to impeach a witness. It’s not even an adversarial process.
I will presume, until I see evidence to the contrary, that if the officer isn’t indicted, then there was not sufficient evidence to bring a legitimate indictment. Sure, prosecutors often get grand juries to indict on insufficient evidence. Are you really advocating that? Why? Because the protesters and civil rights groups want it to be a racist cop shooting an unarmed kid, rather than a scared cop shooting a charging thug with more than a 100 pounds on him who already tried to get his gun?
Jack is right that the process Darren Wilson went through is not inherently unjust. And going back to my hypothetical shooting in which Vern killed Earl, I think it’s entirely possible that citizen Vern would receive the same three months of investigation, and the same weighing of evidence, that Officer Wilson did.
The difference is that Vern would be indicted by the grand jury the first day (or just charged directly), and the rest of the process would take place while Vern sat in jail, unless he was able to make whatever really high bail the judge gave him. Also, some of the investigation would probably be done by the defense rather than the prosecutor, and if the prosecutor wasn’t convinced, Vern would have to go to trial or take a plea to a lesser crime.
To illustrate why Darren Wilson’s wonderful treatment by the prosecutor makes people angry, let’s change the hypothetical a bit: Let’s suppose it turns out that Vern is actually a second cousin to former President Bill Clinton. Then suppose the media begins finding witnesses who say that Earl had his hands up when Vern shot him. Now imagine that without interviewing some of those witnesses, and before the forensics are in, the chief of police makes statements of support for the Clinton relative and says he won’t be charged.
However, Earl’s family and friends drum up public criticism, so the county prosecutor — who has family members that work for the Clintons — announces that he will present the case to the grand jury. Unlike most presentations to a grand jury, in which a few witnesses are presented over a couple of days, this case drags on three months and includes 60 witnesses. Unlike most presentations to a grand jury, Vern testifies and tells his side of the story. Unlike most presentations to a grand jury, the prosecutor does not explicitly ask the grand jury for a particular criminal charge. And in the end, unlike most presentations to a grand jury, there’s no true bill, and Clinton’s cousin walks away a free man.
And so my question to Jack: Given your low opinion of Bill Clinton’s ethics, if you found out that a relative of his had been no-billed by a grand jury proceeding unlike any other, run by a prosecutor with close ties to the Clinton family, wouldn’t you be damned suspicious? Wouldn’t that set off your ethics alarms?
Now if you replace Vern with Darren Wilson, Earl with Mike Brown, and “Clinton family” with “police,” that suspicious scenario is pretty close to how the Ferguson grand jury decision feels to a lot of us: A killer with ties to a politically influential group benefited greatly from a one-of-a-kind grand jury proceeding.
Ultimately, the decision may in fact be the right one, but that kind of privilege and special treatment is astoundingly unfair.
(Caveat: I wrote my original post and parts of this one before the grand jury decision was released to the public. I haven’t read the full document release, nor do I plan to — I’ll wait for analysis from some of the web’s smart legal minds. It’s certainly possible that some of the issues I previously viewed as suspicious will turn out to have reasonable explanations once I catch up, but I maintain that I was right to be suspicious at the time.)
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