General Discussion
Showing Original Post only (View all)I think Wilson is a bad cop, quite possibly a racist, but I also think this was an unwinnable case. [View all]
McCulloch is a Democrat and I haven't seen anything to say that he is some kind of racist cracker. If there had been witnesses with consistent, non-changing stories, that agreed with a scenario where Brown had his hands up or was trying to surrender, and whose accounts were consistent with the forensics, I am sure he would have obtained an indictment and taken the case to trial.
The problem was that when he looked at the case, with the prevaricating witnesses, shifting stories, and the forensics proving that witness statements were false, he saw that it was an unwinnable case. Prosecutors look ahead to the trial stage and if they see that the evidence is not there to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, they will drop the case. That's why prosecutors almost always obtain indictments when they ask for one; they believe that there is evidence of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and have no trouble at all persuading a grand jury of probable cause (a much lower standard). Most of the time no mitigating evidence at all will be presented to the grand jury, simply because there isn't any.
But this was an unusual case. For reasons that are fairly clear, while McCulloch believed the case was unwinnable, he did not want to take the responsibility of dropping the charges all by himself. So he spread this responsibility over all 12 grand jurors, giving them every scrap of information that he had, and allowed them to take some heat off him by arriving at the same conclusion.
Could McCulloch have manipulated the grand jury to get an indictment? Of course. He could have only chosen the most damning witnesses without telling the jurors about their changing stories. He could have presented no forensic evidence, or presented it selectively. But why would he do this, and have to go to trial with an embarrassingly weak case which he was certain he would lose? After all, a real trial would include every witness, with defense attorneys shredding their changing stories apart, and every last piece of forensic evidence. So yes, he was hoping for and anticipating no indictment, not because he is a cop-loving racist (who is weirdly a member of the Democratic party) but because he saw the case as unwinnable at trial.
None of this is to say, of course, that Wilson did the right thing. And I think a civil suit is inevitable which will almost certainly be settled ahead of trial for a substantial amount. And Wilson's career is likely over, as it should be.