Crook: Ferguson’s grand jury delivers a mockery of justice
The shameful mockery of judicial process that has transpired in Ferguson, Missouri, is widely viewed as a matter of racial politics. Of course, in one sense, that’s right: Race underlies enormous and well-documented inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. But in another way, it’s a pity, because this system now borders on the tyrannical, and ought to scare all Americans, regardless of skin color.
I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that the lesson from Ferguson is that, in the United States, if you get into an altercation with a police officer, he’s within his rights to kill you. The fact you are unarmed when he shoots you six times, including twice in the head, doesn’t even rise to the "probable cause" required to put the officer on trial. For a country that so prides itself on liberty and the rule of law, this state of affairs is astonishing.
I’m an immigrant and a born-again admirer of Americans and their country. But I’m driven to conclude that the U.S. is a nation too much in love with its judicial rituals to care very much about justice. It mistakes elaborate yet unthinking obeisance to these processes — the more arcane the better — as dedication to the cause of liberty under the law. It’s really the opposite.
I’ve written about the U.S. justice system before, calling it a national disgrace. Previously I dwelt on plea bargains (that is, on the de facto abolition of trial by jury, and the prosecutorial abuses this enables), mandatory minimum sentences, the endless proliferation of law-enforcement agencies, and the ever-widening scope of conduct defined as criminal. (For some reason I forgot to mention civil forfeiture.) Now in Ferguson we have a brutal demonstration of the impunity of police power.
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/1876554-155/crook-fergusons-grand-jury-delivers-a
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