Prosecutor Manipulates Grand Jury Process to Shield Officer
You know the fix is in when a suspect who shot an unarmed man voluntarily provides four hours of un-cross examined testimony to a grand jury without taking the Fifth.
On August 9, Ferguson, Missouri Police Officer Darren Wilson gunned down 18-year-old African American Michael Brown. Since that fateful day, people across the country have protested against racial profiling, excessive police force, and the failure of the criminal justice system to provide accountability.
The nail in the coffin of "equal justice under law" came on November 24, when the St. Louis County grand jury refused to indict Wilson for any criminal charges in the shooting death of Brown. In a virtually unprecedented move, St. Louis Prosecutor Robert McCulloch in effect deputized the grand jurors to sit as triers of fact as in a jury trial.
In a normal grand jury proceeding, the prosecutor presents evidence for a few days and then asks the grand jurors to return an indictment, which they nearly always do. Of 162,000 federal cases in 2010, grand juries failed to indict in only 11 of them, according the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Police
line up in the street outside the police department in Ferguson, Mo.,
Nov. 25, 2014. Police say 45 people were arrested overnight in a second
night of demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., that were smaller and not as
violent as they had been on Monday, following a grand jury decision not
to indict a white police officer for killing an unarmed black teenager.
(Whitney Curtis/The New York Times)
