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Why Ferguson is so mad at prosecutor Bob McCulloch

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With 70000 signatures saying no, should McCulloch have handled the case? In light of his history clearly the answer is NO.
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The lawyer’s rambling remarks on Monday night aren’t the real problem. It’s his controversial past.

By Andrew Romano November 25, 2014 4:26 PM Yahoo News

PHOTO - St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch announces the grand jury's decision not to indict Ferguson police

When St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch took to the podium late Monday night to announce the grand jury’s decision on the controversial death of Ferguson, Mo., teenager Michael Brown, he didn’t deliver an indictment of Darren Wilson, the local police officer who shot and killed Brown on Aug. 9.

In fact, the only person who was indicted — in the court of public opinion, at least — was McCulloch himself.

“An extended whine and complaint,” said CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin .. http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/25/us/ferguson-grand-jury-mcculloch/. “Entirely inappropriate and embarrassing.”

“A long-winded, smirking speech,” added Gawker .. http://gawker.com/ferguson-prosecutors-idiot-speech-blames-everyone-but-d-1662970833/all.

“Bizarre,” concluded the Daily Mail .. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2848715/Prosecutor-Bob-McCulloch-s-bizarre-press-conference-clearing-Darren-Wilson-instead-blaming-insatiable-appetite-news-outlets-social-media-talk-about.html.

Attorney General Eric Holder, meanwhile, was “particularly angry” at McCulloch for invoking his name and “tak[ing] the focus off the grand jury and put[ing] it squarely on [McCulloch himself],” according to the New York Times .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/us/holder-finds-dwindling-options-to-ease-fergusons-tensions.html. "This process is broken," said Benjamin Crump, a Brown family attorney.

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INSERT - Unorthodox police procedures emerge in grand jury documents
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/seemingly-unorthodox-police-procedures-emerge-in-grand-jury-documents/2014/11/25/48152574-74e0-11e4-bd1b-03009bd3e984_story.html
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The judgment of McCulloch was remarkably swift — and remarkably harsh. But why?

The answer has as much to do with the way McCulloch has conducted himself as a prosecutor for the last 25 years as with the words he uttered Monday night — and it’s leading critics to say that we should be more careful about who we allow to oversee cases such as Brown’s in the future.

Part of the problem was McCulloch’s monologue .. http://www.c-span.org/video/?322925-1/ferguson-missouri-grand-jury-decision-announcement, which he delivered at night, when violence is more likely to occur and crowds are harder to control .. http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/25/opinion/toobin-ferguson-grand-jury/. Viewers in Ferguson and elsewhere were shocked that, before revealing the grand jury’s verdict, McCulloch spent 10 minutes hectoring Twitter for showing interest in Brown’s tragic death. “Within minutes, various accounts of the incident began appearing on social media, accounts filled with speculation and little if any solid, accurate information,” McCulloch said. “Almost immediately, neighbors began gathering and anger began growing because of the various descriptions of what had happened.”

The response from actor Wil Wheaton .. https://twitter.com/wilw/status/537069122853408768 .. was typical: “Remember that time social media shot an unarmed teenager, and left his body on the street for four hours? Bob McCulloch remembers.”

But in truth, the problem runs deeper than McCulloch’s rambling remarks. The real problem is that everyone who’s been paying attention to Ferguson over the last few months was primed to distrust him long before Monday night.

For decades McColluch has been viewed suspiciously by many in his own community. They regard him as having a strong prosecutorial bias in favor of law enforcement and an unusually strong prejudice against its accusers.

His family background reinforces this suspicion. McCulloch’s father, brother, nephew and cousin all served with the St. Louis Police Department; his mother was a clerk there. On July 2, 1964, when McCulloch was 12, his father, a 37-year-old canine officer, Paul McCulloch, was shot in the head and killed by a fleeing kidnapper named Eddie Glenn in the former Pruitt-Igoe housing projects. McCulloch never got over his father’s slaying. He resolved to become a police officer himself, but he was forced to rethink his career ambitions after losing a leg to cancer as a teenager. “I couldn’t become a policeman,” McCulloch once told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “So being county prosecutor is the next best thing.” His father’s death was a major theme in his first campaign ads.

McCulloch showed a knack for controversy from the start. Shortly after taking office in 1991, he charged Axl Rose with misdemeanor assault and property damage for allegedly hitting a security guard, hurting three concertgoers and damaging a dressing room at Riverport Amphitheater after a riotous Guns N’ Roses concert .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverport_Riot .. ended with injuries to 40 fans and 25 police officers. McCulloch made headlines by pursuing Rose across the country to serve an arrest warrant. “Wherever he goes, we’ll be waiting for him,” McCulloch told the media. “If he wants to cancel his whole schedule, fine. If he leaves the country, we’ll notify Customs to get him when he comes back.”

But it was a pair of later cases that convinced locals McCulloch’s sympathies lay with government and law enforcement officials and not with their alleged victims.

In 1997, an employee of the St. Louis County Economic Council named Russ Signorino contacted the FBI to report what he said was improper behavior by a member of the county executive’s cabinet. He also sent reporters an anonymous fax from a Kinko’s in Creve Coeur, Mo. Claiming that the fax contained a threat, McCulloch gave a grand jury subpoena to the county police, who then used it to obtain security footage from Kinko’s showing that Signorino had sent the message.

The only hitch? McCulloch never told the grand jury what he was doing, and he later admitted that Signorino had never issued a threat or committed a crime. No matter: Signorino was forced to resign anyway. According to the Post-Dispatch, McCulloch denied .. http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/sign-petitions-seeking-special-prosecutor-in-michael-brown-shooting/article_d0cc6e7f-8b32-5153-8ab4-86ebdc4659ca.html .. “that he had abused the grand jury process to identify a whistleblower who was acting lawfully.”

PHOTO - A protestor poses for a "hands up" photo in front of a burning building on West Florissant Ave. in Ferguson, Mo., …

In 2001, McCulloch convened another grand jury after a pair of undercover drug officers shot and killed two men, a suspect and his passenger, outside a Jack in the Box in Berkeley, Mo. The officers told the jurors that they had fired only after the suspect tried to run them over with his car, and in his public statements about the secret proceedings, McCulloch himself repeatedly insisted that “every witness” had corroborated the officers’ version of events.

But a subsequent report by the Post-Dispatch .. http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/sign-petitions-seeking-special-prosecutor-in-michael-brown-shooting/article_d0cc6e7f-8b32-5153-8ab4-86ebdc4659ca.html .. revealed that McCulloch had lied. Only three of the 13 detectives who testified said the suspect's car had moved forward. Two of them were the shooters themselves; the third was "a detective who McCulloch later said he considered charging with perjury because his account was so at odds with the facts." According to the grand jury tapes, “four other detectives testified that they never saw the suspect’s car travel toward the officers.” A collision expert working for the Justice Department also determined that the suspect's car had remained in reverse throughout the incident. But McCulloch never brought any of this evidence before the grand jury — and, as a result, the jurors determined that the officers were right to fear for their safety. The case didn't go to trial.

When activists protested, McCulloch snapped back. “These guys were bums,” he said of the suspects. “The print media and self-anointed activists have been portraying the two gentlemen as folk heroes and have been vilifying the police. I think it is important for the public to know that these two and others like them for years have spread destruction in the community dealing crack cocaine and heroin.”

This summer, African-American leaders called for a special prosecutor to replace McCulloch on the Brown case, citing these controversies as well as McCulloch’s decision to support challenger Steven Senger (a white man) over incumbent Charlie Dooley (a black man) in the 2014 Democratic primary for county executive. “Nobody thinks Michael Brown can get a fair shake from this guy,” Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman, told the New York Times .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/us/st-louis-county-prosecutor-defends-objectivity.html?ref=us. “There is very little faith, especially in the black community, that there would ever be a fair trial.” Missouri state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed presented a petition with 70,000 signatures calling for McCulloch to recuse himself from the case, but McCulloch refused to back down.

“I have absolutely no intention of walking away from the duties and responsibilities entrusted to me by the people in this community,” he told KTRS in St. Louis. “I have done it for 24 years, and I’ve done, if I do say so myself, a very good job.”

But given the blowback to McCulloch’s remarks on the Brown decision — and the arson, looting and violence that plagued Ferguson overnight .. http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/25/justice/ferguson-grand-jury-decision/index.html — it’s hard not to wonder if the situation in Missouri would be a little safer right now, and the conversation across the United States a little calmer, if someone else had been standing at that podium Monday evening. Someone, perhaps, without McCulloch’s history of identifying so forcefully with the police; someone who wouldn’t have been as tempted to spend the second half of his press conference discrediting witnesses and presenting evidence in Wilson's favor — a move that made McCulloch sound more like a defense attorney than a prosecutor.

[ Bob McCulloch: Prosecutor or defense attorney for Darren Wilson?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=108515239 ]

Does this mean the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson is wrong? That it reflects the maneuvering of a biased prosecutor rather than a judicious reading of the facts? Not necessarily. But because McCulloch’s motives have long been in doubt, too many people now assume that he's the reason Wilson won't have to stand trial. That’s dangerous — and divisive. In the future, prosecutors such as McCulloch and politicians such as Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon should recognize that perception matters in controversial cases like Ferguson.

It’s great that McCulloch thinks he’s done “a very good job.” But what may be more important, in the end, is whether the rest of America agrees.

View Comments (7596)

http://news.yahoo.com/how-prosecutor-bob-mcculloch-s-controversial-past-is-making-matters-worse-in-ferguson-212622087.html

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How Not to Use a Grand Jury

By Jeffrey Toobin
November 25, 2014



Credit Photograph by David Goldman/AP

Criminal procedure—the everyday rules of the road—gets a bad rap. It’s said to be rigid, routine, incapable of accommodating the nuances of human behavior. But, as the atypical grand-jury proceedings in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death illustrate, there is a great deal to be said for prosecutors following the customary rules of their profession.

To recap the relevant facts: Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old man, on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. Robert McCulloch, the local prosecutor, had the authority to charge Wilson with a crime; that’s how the vast majority of prosecutions in the area begin. Instead, McCulloch said that he was going to open a grand-jury investigation and, in an even rarer development, present every scrap of evidence produced in the investigation to the jurors for their consideration.

In Missouri, as elsewhere, grand juries are known as tools of prosecutors. In the famous words of Sol Wachtler, the former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich” if he wanted to. This is certainly true, but it is true, too, that grand juries retain at least a nominal independence. They usually do what prosecutors want, but they are not legally required to.

In sending Wilson’s case to the grand jury, McCulloch technically turned over to them the decision about whether to prosecute. By submitting all the evidence to the grand jury, he added to the perception that this process represented an independent evaluation of the evidence. But there is little doubt that he remained largely in control of the process; aggressive advocacy by prosecutors could have persuaded the grand jurors to vote for some kind of indictment. The standard for such charges—probable cause, or more probable than not—is generally a very easy hurdle. If McCulloch’s lawyers had simply pared down the evidence to that which incriminated Wilson, they would have easily obtained an indictment.

The grand jury chose not to indict Wilson for any crimes in connection with Brown’s death. In a news conference following the decision, McCulloch laid out the evidence that he believed supported the grand jury’s finding. In making the case for Wilson’s innocence, McCulloch cherry-picked the most exculpatory information from what was assembled before the grand jury. The conclusion may even have been correct; based on a preliminary review of the evidence before the grand jury, it’s not clear to me that a trial jury would have found Wilson guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

But the goal of criminal law is to be fair—to treat similarly situated people similarly—as well as to reach just results. McCulloch gave Wilson’s case special treatment. He turned it over to the grand jury, a rarity itself, and then used the investigation as a document dump, an approach that is virtually without precedent in the law of Missouri or anywhere else. Buried underneath every scrap of evidence McCulloch could find, the grand jury threw up its hands and said that a crime could not be proved. This is the opposite of the customary ham-sandwich approach, in which the jurors are explicitly steered to the prosecutor’s preferred conclusion. Some might suggest that all cases should be treated the way McCulloch handled Wilson before the grand jury, with a full-fledged mini-trial of all the incriminating and exculpatory evidence presented at this preliminary stage. Of course, the cost of such an approach, in both time and money, would be prohibitive, and there is no guarantee that the ultimate resolutions of most cases would be any more just. In any event, reserving this kind of special treatment for white police officers charged with killing black suspects cannot be an appropriate resolution.

Would Wilson have faced charges if he had been treated like every other suspect in McCulloch’s jurisdiction? We’ll never know—and that’s the real shame of this prosecutor’s approach.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/use-grand-jury