Jesus, all that over a traffic fine? :eek:
That’s a start. One would need to know literacy rates, conviction rates, and things like how many are registered voters and/or how many work jobs where they can take time off. IOW it may be skewed towards retired cops because it is skewed towards retired people in general.
Regards,
Shodan
A traffic fine that she had been making monthly payments on, and the city couldn’t explain why they arrested her. They fired the officers and settled a lawsuit but apparently couldn’t get the grand jury to recommend going to trial.
It makes sense that jury pools would be skewed toward retired people in general, but are retired police officers a large percentage of total retirees? According to Wikipedia, there are 780,000 active duty police in the united states. There are about 144 million people working in the United States in total, so police are about 0.5% of employed people, and should be approximately the same percentage of retired people, and that’s not including the non-working retired (e.g., wives of retired men), which would probably push it down to less than a quarter of a percent. I would think that a truly representative jury shouldn’t have more than, let’s say 2% retired police officers.
Literacy rates in the U.S. are 99%, so I doubt that has a significant impact.
At this point, in states where it’s a real problem, the statutes should be changed such that a prosecutor may not deflect his/her ministerial duty by pawning off a decision whether to charge a cop for criminal behavior onto a GJ. Even though the prosecutor has absolute immunity for decisions not to prosecute someone, they need to be the person taking the political and other heat for the nonfeasance that is refusing to charge.
Pretty remarkable that the lady in Texas felt obliged to take $75,000 (or, rather likely $50k, unless that settlement was her cut and the attorney fees were covered by another portion).
Sorry if it’s been cited already, but descriptions of the grand jury that investigated the death of Eric Grner suggest they were biased. They spent only a few minutes questioning the photographer of the famous video; they did find time to ask him if he’d ever been arrested.
Unless the literacy rates among Hispanics in Texas are different from that average.
Regards,
Shodan
The racism of older whites is breathtaking. Now I know why conservatives hate public education…Obama would never have won without the votes of younger whites, who learned to accept minorities as a direct result of their experiences in public schools.
My comment on literacy rates was in regard to my thesis of “It makes sense that jury pools would be skewed toward retired people in general, but are retired police officers a large percentage of total retirees?” Not to the point of the underrepresentation of hispanics on grand juries.
If we’re going to address the underrepresentation of hispanics on Texas grand juries, I would expect that if petit juries can comply with constitutional requirements on hispanic representation, then I would think grand juries could do the same.
Arizona cop caught on cam brutally attacking teen girl while mother begs them to stop.
“Luis Paul Santiago, the witness who filmed the violent encounter stated that police attempted to delete the video, and the second officer on the scene explained that the officer “behaved correctly” and stated that “if she needed to, she could have shot her dead.””
This doesn’t really deserve its own thread, so I’ll just drop it here.
A cop arrests a guy for parking in a good parking spot
Not only was did this fucker arrest the guy over absolute bullshit, but he also severely injured him.
And it has taken the guy two years to have his name cleared.
I’m guessing this police officer still has his job, though. I’m sure the citizens of Broward County are very appreciative of this.
Yes, I understand that. My point was that, if it were the case that the other qualifications of grand jurors, like literacy or being registered to vote, are significantly different than the general public, that would be reflected in the different rate at which they were selected for grand juries.
Regards,
Shodan
The Eric Garner case seems to be catching on nationally (and on both sides of the spectrum) in a way that Ferguson never did. The polling for the Garner case is nearly opposite from the Michael Brown case, as far as the lack of indictments – a significant majority (including a majority of white people) disagree or strongly disagree with the lack of an indictment in the Garner case.
Perhaps this is due to the video evidence?
Martin Hyde is an ignorant pig-molesting halfwit. We all knew that. 
I guess it’s helpful when you have video (and also that it was a situation where the police could’ve and should’ve simply effected an arrest by way of issuing a citation for him to appear, as I presume was routinely done with past charges).
Undoubtedly that is a major factor.
Also, the two cases are simply quite different - I have always maintained that the Garner case was a better case for pressing for change than the Brown case. These poll results demonstrate why.
“Just one week after FOX31 Denver first aired a citizen’s videotape of a police officer punching a drug suspect in the face, then tripping his pregnant girlfriend, the Denver Police Department has given that same officer a promotion.”
Somebody squealed?