A D.A. Takes A Dive In Ferguson

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

The one thing that kept going through my mind as the world waited and waited and waited for the grand jury decision in the case of State of Missouri vs. Darren Wilson was, “Man, I wish every defendant got the level of due process that guy’s getting.”

Because let me tell you, folks, if it had been Michael Brown’s case — or yours or mine, for that matter — in front of that grand jury, there wouldn’t have been weeks of waiting for a decision. The grand jury would have indicted and been home before lunch.

I’ve been in Superior Court when a grand jury is meeting more times than I can count. I’ve seen a couple of hundred cases at a time handed to them. And I’ve seen those cases come back within hours with every single blessed one of them marked “a true bill.” Many of those defendants that go to trial are either exonerated or found guilty of lesser charges by the full or “petit” jury.

No less a conservative jurist than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has explained the purpose of the grand jury as “not to determine guilt or innocence, but to assess whether there is adequate basis for bringing a criminal charge. … That has always been so; and to make the assessment, it has always been thought sufficient to hear only the prosecutor’s side.”

A typical grand jury hears only what the prosecutor wants it to hear and routinely rubber-stamps whatever the DA asks for.

The way prosecutor Robert McCulloch presented the Wilson case to the grand jury, however, was, to say the least, extraordinary. Rather than present the evidence most favorable to the state and ask for a specific charge, as it’s usually done, McCulloch decided he’d present all the evidence, good and bad, to the grand jury, and let it decide.

Sounds great, huh? I agree. I’d love it if all grand juries were like that. But they’re not. Not for the likes of you and me. Instead of the usual procedure, McCulloch transformed the grand jury into a mini-trial of the matter — which his office then proceeded to deliberately lose for the state.

If you look at the transcripts, you see DAs vigorously cross-examining the witnesses who support what would have normally been the state’s case, while treating the supposed defendant with kid gloves and accepting his story at face value. (“If he had not grabbed the gun while he was hitting you in the face, would you still have used deadly force”?)

St. Louis County Assistant District Attorneys Kathy Alizadeh and Sheila Whirley, who examined Wilson, didn’t even bother to cross-examine him on the unlikely things in his testimony. Things like Wilson’s claim that Michael Brown hit him in the face — hard enough to make Wilson fear for his life — with his right hand, a hand Wilson claimed was still holding stolen cigarillos from a convenience store robbery, and yet didn’t break or damage any of those cigarillos. (Q: “Were there any broken cigarillos or anything in your car later?” A: “No.”)

Or the claim that Michael Brown was “reaching into his waistband” as he supposedly charged Wilson, even though, since he was unarmed, there was absolutely nothing to reach for. Or Wilson’s assertion that Brown ran 20-30 feet away from the police car before turning back and charging another 10 feet back toward Wilson, when Brown (as even McCulloch later admitted in his own press conference) died about 150 feet away from the car.

Any DA would have asked these questions — if he or she was trying even halfheartedly for an indictment.

Perhaps the most stunning thing the DA’s office did in throwing this case occurred on Sept. 16, shortly before Wilson testified. At that time, Alizadeh handed the jury a 1979 Missouri statute that says that an officer has the right to use deadly force if “immediately necessary to effect the arrest or prevent the escape from custody.” Alizadeh did not, however, mention that statutes like that had been found unconstitutional six years later by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The St. Louis County DA’s office threw that hearing. And it did so as clumsily as a novice WWE wrestler taking his first dive pursuant to that night’s script.

Darren Wilson may or may not be guilty of murdering Michael Brown. One thing is undeniable, however: He did not receive something that is supposed to be so fundamental a principle of our system that it’s carved into the front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building: “equal justice under law.”

Darren Wilson got breaks from the prosecution that no one else would have. And that is why people are in the streets.

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: 

I knew this one would produce a storm of nasty personal attacks and utterly uninformed balderdash from laypeople claiming expertise in the law while managing to get everything wrong.

As usual, I'm right. 

Anonymous coward "pearlharbor" writes: 

...are you unclear why Wilson shot Brown? Or are you unclear why this was even a story?Let me help you. Brown messed with the wrong cop. If it were me, and I was a cop and some thug reached into my car I would have shot him right then and there.

Inevitably in a story like this, some troll beats their chest and announces how they would have been big and tough and brave in this situation and busted a cap in some thug's ass. The claim of being a tough guy might be a little more credible if the person making it wasn't afraid to use their own name. 

Pearl goes on: To your confusion about the grand jury. Seems like your experience as an attorney is getting in the way of your judgement. [sic] They look at the evidence and decide whether there is enough to convict.

No, they are supposed to look at the evidence and see if, weighing that evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, there is enough to go to trial. 

Maybe in your little legal world defending Michael Brown types it's crystal clear. But out here in the real world average people tend to look at the facts and decide not twist them to mold the outcome they want. It's sad when an attorney loses faith in the system he's been manipulating over the years.

Thanks for the vote of confidence in my ability to manipulate the system. I'm in the phone book. 

The aptly named Walter B, Bull Jr. has this to offer: 

You are an Officer of the Court Dusty and when you have nothing important to say you should just "sit down and shut up."

Mr. Bull, as it turns out, "wrote and published a newspaper, “The Sandhills Pulse” that was distributed in the local community" and now stylesl himself "The Voice of NC" on a blog. Until today, neither I nor anyone I know has ever heard of either the failed "newspaper" or the blog. 

Those who can, do; those who can't, tell those who can to sit down and shut up. 

Of course, no visit to the comments section would be complete without a visit from inveterate gobshite "Francis", he of over 1180 posts, almost all of them personal attacks on me, several of which have been outright libelous and have thus been deleted: 

I would comment but it will be deleted, so I agree " just sit down and shut up ", you have no more information on this than anyone else, always trying to be more than you are.

'Nuff said. 

Message From Ferguson

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

I’ve been hearing it all week: “You’re going to write about Ferguson, aren’t you?” … “What are you going to write about Ferguson?”

To be honest, I’ve hesitated. The unrest following the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., raises a lot of highly charged issues, issues guaranteed to provoke an outpouring of vitriol, whatever you say.

It’s also one in which new “information” comes out every day from a variety of outlets, only to be contradicted the next day. There are a few things, however, that come loud and clear through the noise:

Dear Ferguson Police: Using a loudspeaker to order reporters to “turn off your cameras” just looks bad, especially when you do it on camera. It looks even worse when one of your officers tells reporters, again on camera, that “I’ll bust your head” and that he’ll get away with it because he’ll “confiscate the tape as evidence.”

When a police officer doesn’t want a record of what goes on in a public place, that officer is not to be trusted. And when an entire department, armed to the teeth, doesn’t want a record of what its members do in a public place with unarmed protestors, then that is exactly the kind of department you’ve got to watch. ‬‬‬

If you want to talk about racial disparity in this country, look at the difference in the way the authorities handled the unarmed Ferguson protesters and the way the nut cases at the Cliven Bundy ranch were treated.

Bundy and his militia supporters got off scot-free after pointing rifles at federal agents and claiming they would kill any federal agent who tried to arrest Bundy for flouting multiple court orders and grazing his cattle on public land without paying for it. 

Those people didn’t so much as smell a whiff of tear gas.

If the Bundy ranch crazies pointing their guns at the feds had been African-American, they’d have been tear-gassed at least, and the right would be calling Obama racist because the feds weren’t using napalm.

But wait! Isn’t this disparity the perfect argument for those “Second Amendment remedies”? After all, aren’t our guns our last line of defense against overbearing and tyrannical authority? Well, maybe, but only for white people. Don’t believe me? Every right-wing nightmare of oppression is coming true right now in Ferguson, and we don’t hear a word from the NRA.

While we’re at it, how many African-American faces do you see in the Open Carry movement? A white man walking into Chipotle with an assault rifle can claim he’s exercising his Second Amendment rights. Let a black man do it, and he’ll be lucky not to get his head blown off by a SWAT sniper before he gets to the hostess stand.

Heck, black people don’t even have to be armed. Apparently, the justification Officer Darren Wilson used for shooting Michael Brown (who, let us not forget, was completely unarmed) is that Brown attacked Wilson.

It should be noted that: This version of events is denied by every eyewitness to the event; no ambulance was called for Officer Wilson; no first aid was administered; and video taken immediately after the shooting shows Wilson walking around calmly with no apparent injury.

Even if true, this “defense” raises the question of how the Ferguson Police Department can afford all those fancy military-style vehicles and sniper rifles we saw pointed at protesters on TV, but can’t seem to provide them with Tasers, which is the usual police weapon deployed against a rowdy subject.

Even though Michael Brown supposedly stole some cigars from a store not long before being killed, the Ferguson PD has admitted that Officer Wilson had no knowledge of the alleged robbery. No witness (and there were several) supports the story that Brown was struggling with the officer for his gun.

Which means the revelation of an alleged robbery is offered more as a smear of the deceased than a justification for the shooting. Officer Darren Wilson wasn’t scared of a strong-arm bandit; he was just scared.

Which brings us to our last point. The latest report from the Ferguson PD is that Wilson isn’t really a bad guy. He’s not a “cold-blooded killer,” as some have described him. And you know what? He may not be. The evidence we’ve heard could also support a theory that he’s a young, frightened, poorly trained officer in a police department ruled by arrogance, mistrust, and outright fear of a large part of the community they’re supposed to be protecting.

It’s the same fear that’s corroding American society from the inside. Ferguson is just the latest symptom.