There are plenty of questions swirling around St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch in the wake of the grand jury's decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. McCulloch's performance last night in announcing the decision prompted some great ones .. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/25/1347320/-The-questions-no-one-asked-St-Louis-prosecutor-Bob-McCulloch .. from Mark Sumner, but let's back up a few months to the basic decision by McCulloch in taking this to the grand jury, and how he presented the case there. As more information comes out, it looks more and more like the very unusual process McCulloch kicked off was intended to get the result he wanted—no indictment.
--- What possible reason was there for a prosecutor to seat a grand jury for an indictment he didn't want for an accused he wanted to defend? — @jesseltaylor .. http://twitter.com/jesseltaylor ---
Let's start with McCulloch's refusal to step aside .. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119172/ferguson-prosecutor-robert-mcculloch-should-step-aside .. in this case. The people in and around Ferguson gave a vote of no confidence, in effect, to McCulloch when 70,000 of them signed a petition demanding that he recuse himself. McCulloch's history is problematic, at best, and his alignment with the cops unquestioned. His father was a cop, who was killed in the line of duty by an African-American person. When the county police clearly were overreacting in handling the protests immediately following the killing, and Gov. Jay Nixon called in the state highway patrol to try to calm the situation down, McCulloch loudly and publicly criticized him for "denigrat[ing] the men and women of the county police." McCulloch's bias going into this grand jury proceeding was unquestioned, certainly in the community, and his refusal to step aside guaranteed that there would be a high level of distrust in the proceedings.
For more on those proceedings, and the vast array of problems in how this process unfolded, please continue reading after the jump.
--- This was not a typical .. http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/ferguson-grand-jury-unusual-ways-27103419 .. grand jury proceeding in which only a few witnesses testify, the prosecutor tightly controls what grand jurors hear, and the suspect does not testify at length about why he should not be charged. ---
Finally, there was McCulloch's performance last night, which put him firmly in the role of defense attorney for Wilson, and demonstrated why this case should have gone to trial. McCulloch spent something like 45 minutes covering all the evidence presented to the grand jury, every detail step by step of how the shooting unfolded, every discrepancy in witnesses' statements. Then he released all that evidence publicly .. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/25/1347312/-4-799-pages-of-grand-jury-testimony-in-the-Darren-Wilson-case, which he was not required by any means to do, but did apparently in an attempt to paint the grand jury process as fair. Here's the main problem .. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120403/mcculloch-implicitly-conceded-need-wilson-trial-michael-brown .. with what McCulloch did Monday night, as summed up by Noam Scheiber.
--- The problem with this is that we already have a forum for establishing the underlying facts of a case—and, no less important, for convincing the public that justice is being served in a particular case. It’s called a trial. It, rather than the post-grand jury press conference, is where lawyers typically introduce mounds of evidence to the public, litigate arguments extensively, and generally establish whether or not someone is guilty of a crime. By contrast, as others have pointed out .. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120395/ferguson-grand-jury-makes-issues-no-charges-officer-wilson, the point of a grand jury isn't to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt what actually happened. It's to determine whether there's probable cause for an indictment, which requires a significantly lower standard of proof. That McCulloch appeared to turn the grand jury into an exercise in sorting out the former rather than the latter suggested he wanted no part of a trial. ---
From all the available evidence we have, there's every indication that McCulloch manipulated this grand jury process to get the result he wanted—an exoneration of Wilson. Including this.
--- Prosecutor told #Ferguson grand jury on Friday: "I think you are going to make the right decision. I think you are very bright." — @bradheath .. http://twitter.com/bradheath ---
Can there be any question now what that "right decision" was, as far as McCulloch was concerned?
Originally posted to Joan McCarter on Tue Nov 25, 2014 at 09:42 AM PST.
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