FERGUSON PROSECUTOR’S GRAND JURY PROCEEDING WAS A JOKE

Legal authorities from all sides have stated that irregularities abound in the handling of the Ferguson, MO, Grand Jury.

No, I am not a lawyer.  But yes, there are those within my family that have been involved with, and have been educated and experienced in US law.  And from that experience, while following the activities of the Ferguson, Missouri prosecutor, Bob McCullough, and his efforts with the Ferguson Grand Jury, we have found the actions of this prosecutor totally unacceptable.

 

…Riots after the prosecutor’s announcement of no indictments of officer Darren Wilson

The destruction and outrage that is going on in Ferguson, yes, it is disgusting, but in many ways it is totally understandable.  The reason for that is the prosecutor’s joke of his so-called “Grand Jury proceeding” which goes way beyond the pale.

As the former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked, any prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The data today suggests this judge was not exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which there is data. Grand Juries only declined to return an indictment in 11 of those cases.  That is 99.97% of all Grand Jury’s returned indictments.

But this particular prosecutor should have recused himself from the start.

Bob McCullough has worked directly with, and supported, the Ferguson Police Department for over two decades.  In all that time, he has never indicted a police officer.  His father was a Ferguson Police officer that was killed by a black man when the current prosecutor was only 12 years old.  On top of all that, McCullough’s wife and mother also worked for the Ferguson Police Dept.

It became obvious that this prosecutor decided way ahead of time that he did not want to indict Darren Wilson for shooting the unarmed Michael Brown. McCullough has a long record of protecting his police department, and his decision not to recommend a specific charge to the Grand Jury basically guaranteed there would be no indictment.

 

…Ferguson Police Officer, Darren Wilson, that shot the unarmed Michael Brown

It was totally disgusting that the prosecutor started his announcement of no indictment by blaming the press and social media for whipping up emotions in the case with inaccurate information. (Of course, he did not mention any of what was the so-called inaccurate information.)  He also ridiculed witnesses who had given inconsistent testimony (which always happens) and he took a true coward’s position by hiding behind the Grand Jurors when he said, “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.” 

This of course ignores that this prosecutor totally orchestrated all the information made available to the jurors to insure that they would not indict the Ferguson police officer.

Instead of doing what a Grand Jury is supposed to do, which is to determine if there is “just cause to indict a person” and to then send them to trial, this prosecutor instead acknowledged that his team was essentially serving as Wilson’s defense lawyers.  But this was not a trial, it was only supposed to be there for deciding if there was “just cause” to indict.

If the Grand Jury had just been allowed to do their jobs and had then sent the case to trial, then there would have been lawyers for both sides of the case to argue the evidence. 

As an example of how one-sided it was, in the case that the prosecutor made to the Grand Jury, there was no cross-examination of the 4 hour statement officer Wilson made to the jurors.  Whatever officer Wilson said to the jury was not questioned as it would have been in a regular jury trial.  As an example, in his original statement the officer had said that Michael Brown hit him over 10 times.  But to the jury, officer Wilson said the unarmed teen had only hit him twice. This difference in hits would have had to have been explained in a jury trial.  In fact, at no time was the officer or any of the witnesses that the prosecutor provided ever cross-examined.   The only questions asked came from the prosecutor.  Apparently, even the Grand Jurors did not ask any questions.  Were they told they could ask questions?  Since Grand Juries are secret, so one knows.

Prosecutor McCulloch’s actions reinforced a sense among many African Americans, and others, that the Missouri justice system is totally rigged. A real prosecutor could have easily secured an indictment on a lesser charge simply by requesting it from the Grand Jury, yet the prosecutor instead acted as if he were a spectator and as if this was a normal approach.

As was stated by Judge Wachtler, a grand jury will indict the proverbial ham sandwich if a prosecutor asks it to. Alternatively, McCulloch could have brought charges through a judicial hearing, but because he obviously did not want an indictment, he chose not to do that either.

McCulloch had implied last Monday night that Wilson had stopped his car to confront the black teenager because he recognized him as a robbery suspect. But the Ferguson police chief, Tom Jackson, had stated publicly months ago that the robbery “had nothing to do with the officer’s stopping Mr. Brown.”  Once again, there was no one to question the prosecutor’s statement.

At the end of the prosecutor’s attempt to blame everyone but himself for the Grand Jury’s decision to not indict, Mr. McCullough had the gall to hope that, “changes [would be made] so that nothing like this ever happens again.” Then a reporter asked him, what would he propose changing?  McCulloch became totally speechless but finally answered: “There’s just no way to answer a question like that.”

The real answer is that if McCullough had done the right thing as a prosecutor and had let the justice system run its course, the changes he suggests would probably not be required.

Copyright G.Ater  2014