fivethirtyeight.com | A St. Louis County grand jury on Monday decided not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police Officer Darren Wilson in the August killing of teenager Michael Brown. The decision wasn’t a surprise — leaks from the grand jury had led most observers to conclude an indictment was unlikely — but it was unusual. Grand juries nearly always decide to indict.
Or at least, they nearly always do so in cases that don’t involve police officers.
Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.
3 comments:
What Cobb said http://cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2014/11/ferguson-burning.html
With the Ferguson PD serving as his investigative team; the prosecutor serving as his defense attorney, and the prosecutor’s staff impeaching and disparaging their own witnesses, the deck was stacked for Darren Wilson, and the result was the second lynching of Michael Brown, Jr.
“Don’t disrupt, express. Justice will be served. We respect the rule of law. This is America.” -- The Perfect Proxy. The Dred Scott Decision was the rule of law. Plessy v Ferguson was the rule of law. If people had not disrupted we would not have had the incremental changes that led to his election.
The indictment of Darren Wilson may have satisfied some people, but it would not have begun to address the systemic conditions which proliferates mass injustice against people of color and the poor in America.
Michael Brown and Darren Wilson are dried boogers stuck to the feet of broken pawns on the chess board of the American political economy. Sleep and Eat have patiently and correctly played the board arranged for them by Pettus Bridge levels of incompetence and malfeasance actively in governance in the state of Misery.
More has been accomplished this year under their watch as against the decades old militarization of police, the War on Drugs, and a whole lot of long-standing anti-black policy and law - than I could have hoped for.
Were they the architects and instigators of the change?
Hell no!
But, when the opportunity presented itself, did they rope-a-doped and patiently stayed their hand in decisive and strategic ways that allowed the process to work its way through and lead to a lengthy but inevitable end-game.
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