Prosecutor Used Grand Jury to Let Darren Wilson Walk [View all]

[damnedifIknow]

Robert McCulloch could’ve indicted Michael Brown’s killer himself. Instead, he barely pushed the jurors to charge the cop and allowed the unprecedented step of letting the officer testify. "

St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s announcement of his failure to secure the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the Aug. 9 shooting death of unarmed teen Michael Brown has openly and shamelessly mocked our criminal justice system and laid bare the inequality that is emblematic of criminal jurisprudence in the United States. Monday night’s farcical performance during McCulloch’s press conference, at which he announced the grand jury’s “no true bill” decision, was a failed and poor attempt to convince the residents of Ferguson, St. Louis County, and the nation of the legitimacy and fairness of the grand jury process.

Let’s be candid and clear about grand juries in the United States: They are at all times completely and unalterably under the control and direction of the prosecutor. If the prosecutor wishes to secure an indictment, a “true bill” is inevitably returned. It is extraordinarily rare for a grand jury to override the prosecutor’s intention to obtain an indictment. In my 27 years as a police officer in Boston, I have never heard of a situation in which a prosecutor failed to secure an indictment when seeking such—plainly put: It doesn’t happen. "


*Further, that this case went to a grand jury at all in the first place was largely in deference to Wilson’s status as a police officer. The prosecutor has the option to bring charges against a defendant directly before a judge without invoking the grand jury process at all. This happens all the time; in fact if the outcome in this case had been the death of Wilson and not Brown, Brown would have no doubt been charged before a court the very next day, without the benefit of a months’ long grand jury investigation. Had Brown killed Wilson and not the other way around, Brown would have spent these past months languishing in jail awaiting trial, not collecting a paycheck and planning his wedding"

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/28/prosecutor-used-grand-jury-to-let-darren-wilson-walk.html