{"id":185430,"date":"2014-11-24T09:39:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T14:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/11\/24\/the-grand-jury-no-bills-in-ferguson\/"},"modified":"2014-11-24T09:39:00","modified_gmt":"2014-11-24T14:39:00","slug":"the-grand-jury-no-bills-in-ferguson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/11\/24\/the-grand-jury-no-bills-in-ferguson\/","title":{"rendered":"The Grand Jury No-Bills in Ferguson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not surprised. The District Attorney did his level best to throw the case<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A St. Louis County grand jury has brought no criminal charges against Darren Wilson, a white police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, more than three months ago in nearby Ferguson.<\/p>\n

The decision by the grand jury of nine whites and three blacks was announced Monday night by the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, at a news conference packed with reporters from around the world. The killing, on a residential street in Ferguson, set off weeks of civil unrest \u2014 and a national debate \u2014 fueled by protesters\u2019 outrage over what they called a pattern of police brutality against young black men. Mr. McCulloch said that Officer Wilson faced charges ranging from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The prosecutor threw all this into the grand jury’s lap without a recommendation, a highly unorthodox decision, and even with that, it appears that his presentation was deliberately weak.<\/p>\n

If St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch keeps his promise to release the proceedings to the public, and I don’t expect him to, as it will reveal what he did, or more accurately what he did not do.<\/p>\n

Needless to day the message here is that black lives are downright cheap in Saint Louis County, and probably at a significant discount in the rest of the United States.<\/p>\n

Of course there are also larger issues with policing in the United States, where, for example, Seattle Police were responsible for 20.6% of all homicides<\/a>, and Utah, police kill more people than gangs, drug dealers, and child abuse<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The juxtaposition of a hyper-militarized constabulary with the prison industrial complex is truly disasterous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not surprised. The District Attorney did his level best to throw the case: A St. Louis County grand jury has brought no criminal charges against Darren Wilson, a white police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, more than three months ago in nearby Ferguson. The decision by the grand jury of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185430"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}