USA Politics

OK, I know I've said it before, but I REALLY REALLY REALLY NEED to stay out of this thread. For the most part, I never have my facts straight and I feel I'm pretty much here to make others look bad and I come across the wrong way in doing so. LC, I'm going to ask an unusual request and that is if I ever post in here again, I want to be banned for life from this entire forum.
 
Travis The Dragon said:
LC, I'm going to ask an unusual request and that is if I ever post in here again, I want to be banned for life from this entire forum.
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Travis, I like to think over the last few years that I've gotten a measure of your soul, and I know you're a good person. You wouldn't hurt a fly, and I know you'd really feel bad if you saw things the way some of us see them. But coming and having an opinion is never, ever a bad thing. The bad thing is not listening, and learning.
 
That is very true LC and there have been some very good learning experiences in here for me. So maybe there are times I do need to post things in here that I'm not educated on in order to learn even more.
 
Forostar said:
Ferguson: 67% is black
And even if so: One shot in the leg was enough. It looks like the violence Wilson has used was disproportional.
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You make good points, but this one I feel is a bit strange. Is there any police force, anywhere in the world, where police are trained to shoot people in the leg? Not to my knowledge. And why not? Well, because it takes more skill to aim at a specific part of the body and still be sure that you hit. Police officers are not highly skilled marksmen, so they are trained to aim where the likelihood for stopping the attack is greater. The torso. Because there it's less likely that they will miss.

(The rest of this post is not a reply to the quote from @Forostar, but a comment to the topic in general.)

Of course, this means that whenever a cop pulls out his gun, there is a high risk that he will kill. Therefore, guns should be used with the highest degree of caution. I don't know this particular case well enough that I can judge whether the threat to the policeman was serious enough to warrant brinthe use of a potentially lethal weapon. But this grand jury, with access to all relevant information, has found that the self defense case is plausible enough to conclude with "no criminal charge, because a court can not be expected to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the policeman did something illegal". At least, that's how I understand their conclusion, from what I've seen and read.

What I don't understand, is how it can be justified to start mass protests over the conclusion of one particular case - especially a case where it is not crystal clear that the policeman has committed a crime. The underlying issue - that many black people feel that they are being discriminated against by police and the whole justice system - is a just cause. But in the particular case it seemed like blackmail: Indict Wilson or face the consequences. This, in my eyes, cannot be justified even if the accusations of racism in the justice system are true. Even if the first protesters were peaceful, they must have known that mass protests often attract those who want to loot or just create general mayhem. Something which only helps in creating more victims.
 
The violence in the aftermath should be condemned, the anger should be understood. The violence that Wilson used should also be condemned. What he did looks very disproportional, but the system in which the local prosecutor has a symbiotic relationship with the local police department and the local police officers, is certainly controversial and needs to be changed.

About the leg issue, perhaps there is no specific training, but the shots in Brown's head do not show that the officer went for the "easiest" target. It was the deadliest target.
bearfan said:
The purpose of a grand jury is to determine if their should be a charge or not ... 12 people with no stake in the system determine there was not even the barest amount of evidence to bring a charge. They do not not even have to say there is enough evidence to say the officer is guilty. They just need to see enough evidence that he might be guilty.
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I understood that most of the time, there's just a few witness stories, and then a probable (or bigger) cause leads the grandjury to make a charge. Then the rest comes on. What did the prosecutor do this time (which was unusual)? He put everything on the plate of the 12, even murder charges. This makes it complicated. The only thing that was needed was to make a charge and then the rest should have happened.

This article explains better what I mean, and how the grandjury was used in the wrong way:

Ferguson's Grand Jury Problem

When was the last time you heard of a grand jury decision causing a riot? Well … never. That's because grand juries are obscure relics of past practice, not designed to bear the full weight of a politically and symbolically important decision like the nonprosecution of police officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The decision by St. Louis County Chief Prosecutor Robert McCulloch to put the issue neutrally before the grand jury was intended to create a sense of public legitimacy for whatever result followed, and also no doubt to deflect blame from the prosecutor's own exercise of discretion. It failed on both counts -- and with good reason.

The grand jury has its origins in a medieval English practice: the king, through his sheriff, would order a group of people to appear and report to the authorities the combination of rumor and common knowledge concerning who had committed a crime and needed punishing. The classic history of English law describes it this way: “The ancestors of our ‘grand jurors’ are from the first neither exactly accusers, nor exactly witnesses; they are to give voice to the common repute.” Long before there were police forces, the government had to rely on informed citizens to know what was going on.

The practice developed into an institution that validated accusations and therefore commenced prosecution. In the era when private individuals could bring criminal charges, the grand jury was a useful check on allegations, assuring that they had enough substance to go forward before the accused would be brought to the dock.

The Founding Fathers believed that grand juries had another use: blocking the government from bringing wildly unpopular prosecutions. In the grips of the republican spirit, the state ratifying conventions insisted on putting the grand jury into the Bill of Rights. That's why the federal government still uses them -- and a big reason that roughly half the states use grand juries in some form.

Since the 18th century, however, things have changed. There are no more private criminal prosecutions. And because the grand jury hears only what prosecutors want it to hear, it no longer functions as a meaningful check on their authority. According to the maxim, prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich if they really want to do it. Protection from wrongful prosecution now belongs to the stage of the jury trial, not the grand jury.

All this background is necessary to explain why it was so strange for the prosecutors in Ferguson case to announce that they were going to present evidence to the grand jury and then let it make up its own mind. Prosecutors never treat the grand jury that way. They present a case to the grand jury only if they are actively seeking to prosecute -- then they show the jury the prosecution’s side of the case, and direct the jury to indict if there is probable cause to go forward.

The St. Louis County prosecutors were trying to be clever, repurposing an ancient institution for the contemporary political situation. They seemed to think that, because the grand jury members are drawn from the public, they would create public validation for whatever outcome the grand jury reached.

Yet public validation of ordinary jury trials depends on the public having heard the evidence. The Constitution provides that criminal trials be held publicly, precisely so that the citizenry knows what's going on. Grand jury proceedings are held in secret. That must've appealed to St. Louis County prosecutors, who sought to avoid a media circus. But releasing a summary of the grand jury transcripts afterward is a far cry from a public trial. Secret evidence was unlikely to produce public validation -- as, in fact, it did not.

To make matters worse, the American public understands that a jury must convict beyond reasonable doubt, and that as a result, some guilty defendants are inevitably acquitted. We might not always like it, as the Rodney King verdict reminds us. But at least we understand the rules of the game.

The grand jury, on the other hand, is supposed to present a true bill based on probable cause. The standard is so low that a grand jury refusing to go forward is essentially saying that there was no plausible basis for the case in the first place. Not having seen the evidence, we the public unsurprisingly find it shocking that the shooting of an unarmed man by a police officer should not give rise to at least the probability of a crime.

By bringing the case to the grand jury in this highly unusual way, the prosecutors were also trying to avoid taking responsibility for a decision either to prosecute or not to go forward. It's easy to understand the impulse: Prosecutors would've been criticized for either decision. What could be more appealing than putting the issue to a group of citizens and treating them as a stand-in for the public?

This impulse was seriously misguided, as the riots show. The jury is not the polity -- it's just a random selection of people who don't bear responsibility for enforcing the law. In the modern era, the job of law enforcement belongs to police and to prosecutors. When the police are under investigation, we need to see the prosecutors making and defending a rational decision on their own.

Prosecutorial discretion is an enormous power, as President Barack Obama recently demonstrated in another context by his executive order on immigration. To trust prosecutors with this judgment, we need to see them owning the decisions they make. Deflecting responsibility to a grand jury can't solve the problem -- and in Ferguson, it didn't.
 
Here's another one, which really makes me understand the anger: The f**king special treatment.

... 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. ...

Source: How Not to Use a Grand Jury
 
"In the modern era, the job of law enforcement belongs to police and to prosecutors. When the police are under investigation, we need to see the prosecutors making and defending a rational decision on their own."

... or the prosecutor (like the grand jury) did not see enough evidence to bring a case to trial and brought it to the grand jury.

But @Forostar , you seem determined that this guy is guilty. Why not just skip to the public hanging?

http://www.mediaite.com/online/dan-...ferent-but-thats-not-necessarily-a-bad-thing/

I wouldn't presume to know exactly what Mr. McCulloch thought when he began the process, but I would not be surprised to learn that he had doubts about the evidence against Officer Wilson but felt pressure to have an objective body review the evidence so he did not have to assume the responsibility for such a monumental and controversial decision himself. If true, that is not a scandal but rather exactly what one would hope a prosecutor in his shoes would do.

Now, that does not mean this prosecutor did not control how the evidence was presented to the grand jury. He did. But after reading through the grand jury material, it seems it was the evidence, not how it was presented, that likely swayed the grand jurors. Whatever one thinks about what really happened or how the process should have unfolded, the fact that we learned that the blood evidence matched up with Officer Wilson's account of Michael Brown coming at him and that some of the key eyewitnesses offering damning testimony against Officer Wilson contradicted the physical evidence, would have made it a herculean task to win a conviction against Officer Wilson.
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The bitter irony of the Michael Brown case is that if he had actually put his hands up and said don't shoot, he would almost certainly be alive today. His family would have been spared an unspeakable loss, and Ferguson, Missouri wouldn't have experienced multiple bouts of rioting, including the torching of at least a dozen businesses the night it was announced that Officer Darren Wilson wouldn't be charged with a crime.

Instead, the credible evidence (i.e., the testimony that doesn't contradict itself or the physical evidence) suggests that Michael Brown had no interest in surrendering. After committing an act of petty robbery at a local business, he attacked Officer Wilson when he stopped him on the street. Brown punched Wilson when the officer was still in his patrol car and attempted to take his gun from him.

The first shots were fired within the car in the struggle over the gun. Then, Michael Brown ran. Even if he hadn't put his hands up, but merely kept running away, he would also almost certainly be alive today. Again, according to the credible evidence, he turned back and rushed Wilson. The officer shot several times, but Brown kept on coming until Wilson killed him.


This is a terrible tragedy. It isn't a metaphor for police brutality or race repression or anything else, and never was. Aided and abetted by a compliant national media, the Ferguson protestors spun a dishonest or misinformed version of what happened—Michael Brown murdered in cold blood while trying to give up—into a chant ("hands up, don't shoot") and then a mini-movement.

When the facts didn't back their narrative, they dismissed the facts and retreated into paranoid suspicion of the legal system. It apparently required more intellectual effort than almost any liberal could muster even to say, "You know, I believe policing in America is deeply unjust, but in this case the evidence is murky and not enough to indict, let alone convict anyone of a crime."

They preferred to charge that the grand jury process was rigged, because St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch didn't seek an indictment of Wilson and allowed the grand jury to hear all the evidence and make its own decision. This, Chris Hayes of MSNBC deemed so removed from normal procedure that it’s unrecognizable.

It's unusual, yes, but not unheard of for prosecutors to present a case to a grand jury without a recommendation to indict. Regardless, who could really object to a grand jury hearing everything in such a sensitive case? If any of the evidence were excluded that, surely, would have been the basis of other howls of an intolerably stacked deck.

It’s a further travesty, according to the Left, that Officer Wilson was allowed to testify to the grand jury. Never mind that it is standard operating procedure. As former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, guilty parties usually don't testify because they have to do it without their lawyer present and anything they say can be used against them.

It is also alleged that the prosecutor McCulloch is biased because his father was a cop who was killed by a criminal. Follow this argument though to its logical conclusion and McCulloch would be unable to handle almost all cases, because of his engrained bias against criminality.

Finally, there is the argument that Wilson should have been indicted so there could be a trial "to determine the facts." Realistically, if a jury of Wilson's peers didn't believe there was enough evidence to establish probable cause to indict him, there was no way a jury of his peers was going to convict him of a crime, which requires the more stringent standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.

Besides, we don't try people for crimes they almost certainly didn't commit just to satisfy a mob that will throw things at the police and burn down local businesses if it doesn't get its way. If the grand jury had given into the pressure from the streets and indicted as an act of appeasement, the mayhem most likely would have only been delayed until the inevitable acquittal in a trial.

The agitators of Ferguson have proven themselves proficient at destroying other people's property, no matter what the rationale. This summer, they rioted when the police response was "militarized" and rioted when the police response was un-militarized. Local businesses like the beauty-supply shops Beauty Town (hit repeatedly) and Beauty World (burned on Monday night) have been targeted for the offense of existing, not to mention employing people and serving customers.

Liberal commentators come back again and again to the fact that Michael Brown was unarmed and that, in the struggle between the two, Officer Wilson only sustained bruises to his face, or what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo calls an "irritated cheek." The subtext is that if only Wilson had allowed Brown to beat him up and perhaps take his gun, things wouldn't have had to escalate.

There is good reason for a police officer to be in mortal fear in the situation Officer Wilson faced, though. In upstate New York last March, a police officer responded to a disturbance call at an office, when suddenly a disturbed man pummeled the officer as he was attempting to exit his vehicle and then grabbed his gun and shot him dead. The case didn't become a national metaphor for anything.

Ferguson, on the other hand, has never lacked for media coverage, although the narrative of a police execution always seemed dubious and now has been exposed as essentially a fraud. "Hands up, don't shoot" is a good slogan. If only it was what Michael Brown had done last August.
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Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/ferguson-fraud-113178.html#ixzz3KBMdLEmC
 
I am not determined that he is guilty (nice try), but I am willing to find that out in a good and honest way, as much as possible. Unfortunately this did not happen.

Nothing is as important enough as equal treatment. To me at least. To me it's the core, the major principle of these events, and in this discussion.
 
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Every single piece of evidence is out there ... look at it for yourself. You seem to be complaining that the grand jury had too much information. If they followed the normal process and the prosecutor failed to indict on insufficient evidence, these same people would be bitching that this should have gone to a grand jury. Their only interest is seeing an outcome, no matter what the evidence says. I understand the family being upset, but they are being used as pawns and these people protesting (as is their right) are total fucking morons.

and I guess the mobs did not like this guys testimony.

Questions are swirling over the unexplained murder of DeAndre Joshua, found dead in his car on Tuesday morning, with some speculating that the 20-year-old may have been the victim of a retribution killing for testifying in front of the grand jury in the Michael Brown shooting case.

Joshua was found dead inside a parked car near Ferguson’s Canfield Green Apartments around 9 a.m. Tuesday, just two blocks from where Brown was gunned down by Officer Darren Wilson.

According to one resident, four individuals were overheard discussing plans to kill somebody on Monday night.

The New York Daily News reports that Joshua’s family is, “positive his death is tied to the demonstrations over a grand jury’s decision not to indict Michael Brown’s killer.”

Joshua was described as a “good kid” who was not into drugs and had a steady job.

“DeAndre Joshua, 20, fits the social profile of an eye-witness who gave a police/FBI statement and testified before the Grand Jury in the Mike Brown shooting case,” writes the Conservative Treehouse blog. “He was an employed black male, with no history of drug use or illicit behavior. He was also a friend of Dorian Johnson who is currently under protection.”

A Facebook post by Johnson, who was with Michael Brown at the time of the shooting, appears to confirm that the two knew each other.

The blog also claims that many witnesses who gave testimony to the grand jury which confirmed Officer Wilson’s version of events “were threatened by the local Canfield Greens community.”

This is confirmed by police reports (page 20) which include interviews with residents such as one female eyewitness who said she was apprehensive in talking to detectives “for fear of retaliation.”

“While officials would not say if Joshua was in fact, a witness to the shooting death of Michael Brown, nor if he actually provided testimony to the grand jury which ultimately cleared Officer Darren Wilson of any wrongdoing in the shooting, his murder does point to a retribution-type killing,” reports UFP News.

In a separate incident linked to unrest in Ferguson, two FBI agents were shot after they responded to a situation where a person had been barricaded inside a home. FBI agents were sent to Ferguson in advance of the grand jury decision in part to “assist with threats to federal employees.”

Was Joshua the victim of a retribution-style killing for giving testimony which absolved Officer Darren Wilson of murder? The case remains unexplained, but the fact that someone living a stone’s throw away from where Brown was killed, in addition to being a friend of Dorian Johnson, being the only fatality after two nights of violence, suggests that Joshua may not merely have been the victim of a random act.
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I don't think you, or me, or even that Republican politico.com is qualified to judge that amount of documents, and definitely not within such a short time. To fabricate a story is something journalists are good in, but it would suit them better if they notice how unusual this procedure (which I do not trust) has been.
 
Man, this case stinks so much that it's hard to bear. How on earth can people still defend what happened out there.
We have all the evidence, haven't we? Right.

Ferguson Grand Jury Evidence Reveals Mistakes, Holes In Investigation

1. Wilson washed away blood evidence.
2. The first officer to interview Wilson failed to take any notes.
3. Investigators failed to measure the likely distance between Brown and Wilson.
4. Investigators did not test Wilson’s gun for fingerprints.
5. Wilson did not immediately turn his weapon over to investigators after killing Brown.
6. An initial interview with investigators was delayed while Wilson traveled to the hospital with his superiors.
7. Wilson’s initial interview with the detective conflicts with information given in later testimony.

What do you think Politico will have to say about this, bearfan? They already have an article with the correct title. Now it's time to write something accurate.

+
some more on the system and failures:

Ferguson message: Justice system unfair to minorities

Ferguson shows failure at every level
... Because whatever you think of the decision not to indict Darren Wilson for shooting Brown, basic government functions such as voter registration, police transparency, review of controversial programs, selecting objective prosecutors and community engagement are basic government functions that should have worked far better in response. If any of these entities at any level were functioning properly, the violence in Ferguson could have been largely prevented and the public would have a lot more faith in the grand jury decision that came out today. Instead, the lack of an indictment is yet another reflection of our broken government. ...


And one especially for the ones who are especially bothered by the riots:
When white people riot
 
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See, all you have given me, above, is evidence that Wilson was a bad cop, and the Ferguson police department is a bad police department. But there is a difference between Wilson & Ferguson not doing their jobs and there being enough evidence to suggest that he murdered the kid, rather than acting in what, in US law, is considered reasonable self-defence.

There's definitely problems with the US justice system, this just wasn't as great of a case to highlight them. That's all.
 
You're welcome. I think showed quite well what went wrong (and what is going wrong). I realize that I can't convince everybody out here. I don't really need to.
Voicing my thoughts on this misery can be good enough as well.

Perhaps more tomorrow. More laughs, who knows?
 
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