.. i just saw President Obama speak, the bit they showed here sounded good .. Ferguson is one of the top news stories on Australian tv today ..
The Ferguson prosecutor’s bizarre, self-justifying press conference revealed his own influence.
By David Feige
Rather than take the podium Monday night to announce the grand jury decision, and then go on to explain the process and answer questions, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch launched into a lengthy disquisition on the evidence.
Make no mistake about it—police shootings are complicated cases to investigate, and even harder ones to prosecute. Add a potent racial dimension to the mix and there is almost no way to satisfy the profoundly divergent constituencies with an interest in the case. And there are few things elected officials like McCulloch enjoy less than being forced to decide issues that will alienate voters.
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So McCulloch did something sneaky. He decided to foist the responsibility for an inevitably unpopular decision onto the members of the grand jury. By letting them make the ultimate decision, McCulloch hoped that he would be absolved of the responsibility for either prosecuting a cop or freeing a man many saw as a murderer.
--- He did what prosecutors have always done: present his case to the grand jury and place his thumb squarely on the scale. ---
But in order to do this, McCullough first needed to sell the notion that the grand jury was an independent body. And while there is some historical basis for this claim, in modern America, the grand jury is by no means independent. Rather, it is completely controlled by and ultimately loyal to the prosecutors who submit cases to it. This reality is sufficiently well-known that McCulloch realized that merely claiming that the grand jury would be independent wouldn’t turn the trick. His solution: pledging to change the very nature of how the grand jury works by fundamentally altering its mechanics. McCullough set out to show that in the Wilson case the grand jury was indeed an independent body .. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/11/darren_wilson_grand_jury_ferguson_prosecutor_opens_proceedings_to_both_sides.html .. and that McCulloch was, rather than its overseer, merely its mouthpiece. Rather than frame the case and present carefully curated evidence designed to obtain the result the prosecution sought, McCulloch insisted that the grand jury presentation in the Wilson case would be “open.” That is, the prosecutors would present all the evidence, for every side, and would take no stand, nor play any role in the evaluation of that evidence.
It was, in a way, a brilliant move—McCulloch wrapped himself in a profound loyalty to one of the few unimpeachable virtues in politics: transparency. Indeed, by opening up the process and potentially bringing democracy .. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/11/darren_wilson_grand_jury_ferguson_prosecutor_opens_proceedings_to_both_sides.html .. to one of the dark autocratic corners of the criminal justice system, McCulloch might have been able to do a good thing while at the same time actually managing to shirk responsibility for the very decision he wanted to avoid making. And he might have pulled it off, but for the bizarre self-justifying ramble that was his press conference.
As McCulloch stood in what appeared to be a courtroom—a place where protracted throat clearing and extensive preamble is commonplace—he put the lie to the entire process. Rather than take the podium, announce the decision, and then go on to explain the process and answer questions, McCulloch launched into a lengthy disquisition on the evidence, detailing the physical evidence and the ways in which it both discredited many of the witnesses who claimed to have seen what happened and supported the version of events that had a terrified officer firing in self-defense while being attacked in his car. Over the course of almost 20 minutes, McCulloch didn’t merely fail to get to the question on everyone’s mind, he implicitly demonstrated the very thing he’d spent weeks denying—that he had everything to do with the decision.
What became clear in his rambling presentation was that, just like in every other case, McCulloch had used his role as “legal adviser” to the grand jury to structure evidence and frame the presentation in such a way as to yield the very conclusion suspicious residents of Ferguson always feared. Robert McCulloch hadn’t changed the nature of the grand jury process after all. He hadn’t ceded autonomy to an independent body, he’d done what prosecutors have always done: presented his case to the grand jury, and placed his thumb squarely on the scale. And that may be why, before he even finished the Q&A, windows were smashed, cars were set ablaze, and tear gas began to waft over Ferguson.
There is no question that McCulloch is right when he says that none of us know the evidence the way the grand jury does. And it may well be that the decision not to indict Wilson was legally proper. But what’s improper about what happened was peddling the idea of grand jury independence as a cover for political cowardice. So despite what McCulloch might want, the rage that is spilling over in Ferguson shouldn’t be focused on the grand jury, but rather on the corrupting role of a governmental power that has so neutered the traditional function of grand juries that even when they are supposedly open they cannot truly escape the long shadow of prosecutorial influence.
Read more about Ferguson in Slate.
David Feige is a television writer and the author of Indefensible. He spent 15 years as a public defender and served as the first trial chief of the Bronx Defenders ..
After Ferguson Announcement, a Racial Divide Remains Over Views of Justice
.. it's better, but there is much work to be done ..
By MICHAEL WINESNOV. 25, 2014
Paul McLemore, the first African-American to become a New Jersey state trooper, was on the streets of Newark in 1967 when riots following a police beating of a black taxi driver left 26 dead. He spent decades as a civil rights lawyer and years as a municipal judge in Trenton. His wife and children have gone on to enjoy accomplished careers.
“Of course, there’s been a lot of progress” since Newark’s days of rage, he said in an interview on Tuesday. But asked whether a young black man today could find the justice that was believed to be absent in Newark 47 years ago, he gave a response that was starkly different.
“No, period,” he said. “There’s pervasive racism — white racism.”
For whites and blacks alike, that duality may be the takeaway from a grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson, a Ferguson, Mo., police officer, in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a young black man: Much has changed, and nothing has changed.
A nation with an African-American president and a significant, if struggling, black middle class remains as deeply divided about the justice system as it was decades ago. A Huffington Post-YouGov poll of 1,000 adults released this week found that 62 percent of African-Americans believed Officer Wilson was at fault in the shooting of Mr. Brown, while only 22 percent of whites took that position.
“What’s striking is just how constant these attitudes have been,” said Carroll Doherty, the director of political research for the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington.
In Pew polls, black mistrust of the police and courts is far more pervasive than it is toward other institutions. However, a Pew poll taken .. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/27/within-the-black-community-young-and-old-differ-on-police-searches-discrimination/ .. earlier this year suggests that African-Americans under age 40 — the demographic that made up most of the people who took to the streets in Ferguson in August — are much less likely than their elders to believe that racism is the main force blocking blacks’ advancement.
That whites and blacks disagree so deeply on the justice system, even as some other racial gulfs show signs of closing, is perhaps not as odd as it seems. Decades of changing laws and court decisions mean that the two races now work together, play sports together, attend school together. But they frequently go home to separate worlds where attitudes and experiences toward the police and courts not only are not shared, but are not even understood across the racial divide.
At the end of 2013, 3 percent of all black males of any age were imprisoned, compared with 0.5 percent of whites. In 2011, one in 15 African-American children had a parent in prison, compared with one in 111 white children.
Patricia J. Williams, a Columbia University law professor, said that the war on drugs disproportionately affected blacks — in California in 2011, a black man was 11 times more likely .. http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Race_and_Prison .. than a white to be jailed for a marijuana felony — and that three-strikes laws kept many in jail.
Kenny Wiley, 26, a black man who grew up in a white upper-middle-class suburb of Denver, is one who has seen both sides. The Ferguson shooting, he said, destroyed any notion that his race did not matter — that he could “opt out of the negative parts of blackness.”
VIDEO Holder Criticizes Violence in Ferguson Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. emphasized the need for protesters to honor the wishes of Michael Brown’s father by demonstrating peacefully. Video by Associated Press on Publish Date November 25, 2014.
“I grew up with a lot of economic privilege,” he said, “and still because of my race and my age and my gender, I’m still in certain situations perceived as a threat. When I walk down the street, they don’t see my SAT score, they see a black man.
“I don’t believe most white people are malicious. I think most white people are oblivious. And I think that there’s a lot of work to do.”
Some blacks take a different view. Brian Willingham, a church pastor and black police officer in Flint, Mich., said he was conflicted by the grand jury’s decision, but concluded that it was correct.
“I now realize that we who consider ourselves leaders in the black community can’t just be against racism. We have to also be against a portion of black culture that has become increasingly anti-authority and antisocial to a point of self-destruction,” he said. “This is an enemy we’ve yet to engage in the black community. But it’s a conversation I think we’re forced to have now.”
VIDEO Nation Reacts to Ferguson Decision People around the country protested after a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to bring charges against Darren Wilson, a police officer who fatally shot an unarmed teenager. Video by Quynhanh Do on Publish Date November 25, 2014. Photo by Sam Hodgson for The New York Times.
Blacks and whites who are friends found the case a delicate topic of conversation.
In Atlanta on Tuesday, Nneka Ekechukwu, 23, a South Carolina native of Nigerian descent, was having lunch with Denise Henderson, 45, a white friend and co-worker at an information-technology company. The two discussed the Ferguson case and the racial minefield it epitomizes, tiptoeing through some elements so as not to cause offense.
Ms. Henderson, who grew up in a heavily white part of Oklahoma, said she was concerned that the prosecutor in the Missouri case had brought too much of his own perspective to bear in bringing the evidence of the Brown shooting before the grand jury.
“I do think that so much of it was wrong,” she said. “But I do think it was wrong for Michael Brown to be fighting with a police officer.” Then she looked at her black friend. “But I feel like my saying that, I don’t know, is that an affront to you?” It was not, Ms. Ekechukwu said, but the same words might rankle her if they came from the lips of someone she suspected of prejudice.
For a person of color, she said, it is difficult not to view the Ferguson shooting as part of a continuum: the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, an African-American man, by a white Florida man who was later acquitted of murder; the 2009 fatal shooting of an Oakland black man by a white transit officer who was found guilty of manslaughter instead of murder.
When she heard the recent news that a 12-year-old Cleveland boy had been shot by an officer while wielding a toy gun, Ms. Ekechukwu said, “my first question was, ‘Is he black?’”
Reporting was contributed by Richard Fausset from Atlanta, Julie Turkewitz from Denver, Mary M. Chapman from Detroit, and Susan C. Beachy from New York.
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