“Precedent” meaning “has occurred a few times in a small subset (high profile) of all cases”. And then, only as a political expedient, not in furtherance of the prosecutor’s normal role. So, yeah – pretty damn unusual. And pretty much a shitty cop out. No pun intended.
And Steophan, the differences between “not guilty”, “unindicted”, and “innocent” are a matter of legal definition. Maybe Richard Parker could explain it to you. Or maybe not, considering the way his last effort to provide legal expertise was received in this thread.
Why can’t he pick something between these two things and do what he did: present the matter to a grand jury, giving all of the relevant evidence and let the citizens of the community decide whether a trial is warranted?
It’s a unique case: a significant portion of the population won’t be happy with a summary dismissal, yet justice requires that a man not have to face arrest and trial under the facts that he has, so we let a grand jury decide. I’m not so sure that we don’t have precedent for this. Didn’t the Boulder DA convene a grand jury to investigate the Ramsay case? It had access to all of the evidence with the prosecutor making no recommendation one way or the other. It’s not the traditional use of a grand jury, but what is wrong with this use?
I completely disagree with the “I don’t think he committed a crime but fuckitall let’s try him anyways” use of the state’s power.
As far as the supposed erroneous “fleeing felon” jury instruction, it was harmless. As the physical evidence shows that Brown was not fleeing at the time, it simply doesn’t apply.
I understand the question fully. Yes, I think the result of the grand jury process is legitimate, and the misrepresentation, later corrected, of a law that has no bearing on this case is irrelevant.
The reason it has no bearing on this case is twofold. Firstly, the law concerns shooting someone in the back whilst effecting an arrest, and there’s never been a claim that Wilson shot Brown in an attempt to arrest him. And secondly, it’s been shown that Wilson did not attempt to shoot Brown in the back.
Also given that the law was presented as it appears in the statute books, and the Supreme Court judgement that makes the law no longer valid was also presented, it’s hard to claim that the jury had anything less than complete knowledge of that law. So, even were it relevant, the jury would have had all the information required to make the correct decision.
So yes, I’m fully convinced that the Grand Jury’s findings are legitimate.
The reason for bringing up the issue with “feelings” is that you, and many others including the “protesters” in Ferguson, are against this judgement solely because you feel it’s wrong, not because there’s anything demonstrably wrong with it.
Well yes. The former two are subsets of the last. Someone who’s not guilty has not been proven guilty, so the presumption of their innocence holds. Someone who’s unindicted has not been proven guilty, so the presumption of their innocence holds. Darren Wilson has not been proven guilty, so the presumption of his innocence holds.
You are free to claim otherwise, but you’d be legally wrong and, unless you have evidence that proves his guilt, morally wrong.
[Quote=Steophan]
The reason for bringing up the issue with “feelings” is that you, and many others including the “protesters” in Ferguson, are against this judgement solely because you feel it’s wrong, not because there’s anything demonstrably wrong with it.
[/QUOTE]
No, it is pretty demonstrably wrong to tell the grand jury that it is okay to shoot someone for running away. That false belief would obviously materially affect their evaluation of whether a law was violated in this situation. That is why you yourself described it as very poor.
In this situation, it is your emotional reaction that is clouding your judgment. You must have experienced some cognitive dissonance upon acknowledging how very poor the ADAs action was. To repair this, you’re projecting your affective experience on me.
Lord knows you could not find yourself on the same side of this matter as black people or liberals!
A cite offered earlier in this thread claimed a miniscule number of Grand Juries that, when presented with a case by a Federal prosecutor, failed to produce a “true bill”. I’m not going to search the thread for it, but I find that same assertion here (it may or may not be the same cite) and it is backed up by the US Department of Justice’s Statistics here (PDF! Tables 2.2 and 2.3). Of 193,021 total cases, 15.9% were “declined”. Of all those declined, the total declined because the GJ failed to return a “true bill” was 11. Not 11%. Eleven. Total.
So yeah, I’ll stick with my claim that “unusual” is an accurate description of the frequency with which such a thing occurs. Your cite relies upon a single person’s assertion that politically expedient shirking of a prosecutor’s normal role does occur. Even if we accept his word, he makes no claim that it is a common, or an acceptable, event. If you think the frequency greatly exceeds “a few times”, you’ll need more than rhetoric as proof.
You’re not from around here, are you? So I guess you could be forgiven for failing to recognize that the presumption of innocence is a legal convention intended to prevent punishment by fiat. Its general applicability to all legal residents keeps us from devolving into either lynch mobs or “King’s justice”. Accusations of wrongdoing shall not result in punishment until a legal standard (in criminal law, it’s usually “beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt”) is overcome in a court of law. So it is technically correct to say that someone who is implicated or accused of a crime is “presumed innocent”.
But it sure isn’t correct to declare that person to actually be innocent. People awaiting trial are “presumed innocent”, but some of them are in point of fact guilty of their own special crimes. They certainly aren’t actually innocent. Nor are the unindicted perpetrators of crimes who have not been identified, captured, or accused by the legal system. There are plenty of people running around who have committed crimes and never been caught. They are unindicted, they would be presumed innocent were accusations made (until and unless a court found differently), but they aren’t innocent. And then there are those who have been accused, maybe charged, perhaps even found “not guilty”, but who did in fact perpetrate the crime. People like, say, a certain famous football player. Acquitted, indeed, but in very many people’s minds, far from innocent.
Words have meanings, and those meanings are important. You should strive to learn them. The giant clusterfuck that was the investigation and “prosecution” (I think ironic quotes are justified) of this police-involved shooting leaves many people wondering whether Officer Wilson’s innocence is closer to that football player’s than to a babe in arms.
Ok. Was there a Federal prosecutor involved in this case?
Why don’t you cite what percentage of Grand Juries (not Federal ones) return a no-bill in a case involving police shooting. You know, so that the cite would be relevant to the case in question.
But Flanders and other legal experts think that Garner and the jury instruction don’t solve the problem.
Flanders said the prosecutors in the grand jury actually were wrong to say Garner trumps the law. Garner was the constitutional standard for a civil lawsuit. Missouri does not have to criminalize all police action that is unconstitutional. So, Flanders and other lawyers believe the state law still is in effect.
If Wilson had been indicted using the Garner rule against shooting an unarmed fleeing felon, he could have challenged any conviction by relying on the Missouri law that permits an officer to shoot an unarmed suspect.
As has been explained, the normal situation is that a prosecutor believes that there is probable cause that a crime has been committed, and then presents that evidence to a grand jury. Unless the prosecutor is stretching, the grand jury will come to the same basic conclusion that there is probable cause a crime has been committed and return and indictment.
This is not unusual, and how the process should work. The grand jury is a backstop for situations where the state has become a tyranny or has gone coo-coo bananas and is charging people with non-existent evidence.
In this case, the prosecutor did not think there was a crime committed. The evidence shows there was no crime committed. Your side seems to be asking the grand jury to ignore their role and send the case to trial without probable cause just to satisfy the blood lust of the rioters in the community. The grand jury is supposed to put an end to those types of things.
I am ready to be educated about what I “don’t understand” about the anger of some in the black community. If anyone, black or white, refrains from robbing convenience stores, punching cops in the face, and immediately surrenders when told by a police officer, they are in very little danger of being shot and killed by police. If you do not do the above, then anyone, black or white, is in high danger of being shot by police.
Unpersuasive rhetoric. Do you believe this is a frequent occurrence at the state or municipal level, or are you ‘just asking questions’? Why don’t you cite anything declaring this clusterfuck to be either common or acceptable, let alone both?
Missouri’s statute as written allows police officers to use deadly force to arrest someone who is guilty, say, only of forging a check. As a matter of a state criminal prosecution of a police officer, this inconsistency doesn’t matter. There is no requirement that state law fit with the standards for a federal civil rights suit against a police officer, which is what Garner was. If the attorneys supervising the grand jury thought that Garner somehow “overrides” the state statute, they were wrong.
But that doesn’t mean that the lawyers shouldn’t have given the grand jury their revised statement of the law — whatever exactly it was (I haven’t found it in the files given to us, and we may never see it). The Garner standard is the more sensible standard. In fact, the Missouri pattern jury instructions (the instructions judges have to read if a law enforcement officer’s use of force is at issue at trial) already adopt the Garner standard. till, Missouri law stands unchanged.
Of course, it may be that Wilson’s use of deadly force was justified even under the higher, Garner standard. Garner also says that deadly force may be used “if the suspect threatens the officer with a weapon or there is probable cause to believe that he has committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm.” What we will be debating (and what we should be debating) is whether when Wilson shot Brown, he was shooting at a violent felon or (to quote another passage from Garner) shooting at an “unarmed, nondangerous suspect.”
We could examine this particular prosecutor’s record as regards the shooting death of suspects by policemen. You could, for instance, examine his record of strict prosecutorial discipline in the “Jack in the Box” case, as outlined in Newsweek here:
**
Ferguson Prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch’s Long History of Siding With the Police**
The punchline:
And, of course, the fact that so far as anyone knew or knows, the second man in the car was guilty of felonious sitting, with intent to associate with a not-nice person. Even if the car had been moving in an aggressive and threatening manner, he wasn’t driving it. He is, however, equally dead.
And finally, this:
.
The case cries out for your mad forensic skills. But if it is what it appears to be, the good citizens of Ferguson have ample reason to be dubious about McCulloch’s impartiality. Yes. Indeed.
If Mr. McCulloch main motivation was to avoid the consequences of civil unrest, he might well have recused himself. Would that have prevented the unfortunate consequences? I’m guessing not, but that’s guessing. It would have at least offered some assurance to the black citizens of Ferguson that the legal establishment was concerned with justice. Or at least the appearance…
Of course, if Mr McCulloch’s primary impulse was to assure the legal exoneration of Officer Wilson, he should have done precisely as he did. Worked like a charm in that regard. As far as community relations goes and reassuring the community, at least he did not publicly wipe his butt with a portrait of MLK.
jtgain, if the prosecutor didn’t believe there was a crime, he didn’t need a Grand Jury. He should have simply declared that his investigation didn’t support charges. He would have had to deal with the resulting flack, but that’s why he gets the big bucks. Putting “all the evidence” in front of a GJ, but not asking them for an indictment – and after giving them false information about an important element of the possible crime (shooting a fleeing suspect) – can only be viewed as a cover-his-ass move. A way to deflect community outrage onto someone other than himself.
I hope you are sincere in your willingness to be educated. First, note that your statement “The evidence shows there was no crime committed” is simply incorrect. We cannot know that to be true. Our system has a clearly defined way of deciding whether evidence supports an assertion of criminal action. It’s called a trial. There was no trial here. Grand Juries do not conduct trials. They cannot. Important elements of our legal system are lacking, without which a final determination of evidence cannot be made. That’s why people don’t go to jail whenever a GJ passes a ‘true bill’.
There is no judge presiding, to ensure proper application of Law. Would all the ‘evidence’ presented to the GJ have been allowed into a courtroom? Would legal ‘experts’ have been allowed to offer their opinions? Would the ‘finder of fact’ (usually a jury but possibly a judge if the defendant desires) be ‘charged’ properly (meaning had the relevant laws explained and the possible outcomes identified)? (In this case, it seems the GJ was actually given an unconstitutional interpretation of the law governing a highly relevant question, that of shooting a fleeing suspect. Was that the only transgression?)
There were no vigorous advocates, doing their best to represent their own sides. Thus there were no pointed cross-examinations, whereby the advocates demonstrate shortcomings in others’ testimony. There were no rebuttal witnesses called to refute others’ testimony or evidence. There were no summary arguments nor rhetoric to offer alternative explanations of events. Again, there was no trial.
Thus we cannot know that “The evidence shows there was no crime committed”. We do not know what the result would have been had vigorous advocates presented evidence before an impartial interpreter of the law and a finder of fact made up of citizens from the community. We do know what happened when a prosecutor took political cover and a directionless GJ was left to their own devices. It was a clusterfuck.
Maybe Wilson acted within the law that day. I honestly don’t know. My own reading of the smattering of evidence I’ve perused leads me one way, but I’m far from certain. Even if I read every bit of the evidence the GJ saw, I might not know for sure. After all, I, like the GJ, would not have either the legal formalities of a courtroom to guard against misapplications of law, nor the assistance of dueling vigorous advocates to point out for me issues and interpretations I wouldn’t have seen for myself. Sadly, apparently neither I nor the community at large will ever know for certain, all internet bloviations notwithstanding.
What is a prosecutor supposed to do when he looks at the evidence and concludes that no crime was committed? Recuse himself? Why would he do that? He has no conflict of interest, and it is his job to make these tough decisions.
Should he have a show trial? Put a person he believes committed no crime under arrest, fingerprint him, make him post bond, etc. just to reward people for becoming violent?
Then, of course, instead of protest riots there would have been celebratory riots that burned the town to the ground.
