{"id":185646,"date":"2014-09-18T20:13:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-19T01:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/09\/18\/the-prosecutor-for-the-ferguson-shooting-is-throwing-the-grand-jury-investigation\/"},"modified":"2014-09-18T20:13:00","modified_gmt":"2014-09-19T01:13:00","slug":"the-prosecutor-for-the-ferguson-shooting-is-throwing-the-grand-jury-investigation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/09\/18\/the-prosecutor-for-the-ferguson-shooting-is-throwing-the-grand-jury-investigation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Prosecutor for the Ferguson Shooting is Throwing the Grand Jury Investigation"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has become patently transparent that even inside the beltway know-nothing Dana Milbank feels compelled to call this out<\/a>:<\/p>\n

What happened in Ferguson, Mo., last month was a tragedy. What\u2019s on course to happen there next month will be a farce.<\/span>

<\/span>October is when a grand jury is expected to decide whether to indict the white police officer, Darren Wilson, who killed an unarmed black teenager by firing at least six bullets into him. It\u2019s a good bet the grand jurors won\u2019t charge him, because all signs indicate that the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, doesn\u2019t want them to. <\/span>

<\/span>The latest evidence that the fix is in came this week from The Post\u2019s Kimberly Kindy and Carol Leonnig, who discovered that McCulloch\u2019s office has declined so far to recommend any charges to the grand jury. Instead, McCulloch\u2019s prosecutors handling the case are taking the highly unusual course of dumping all evidence<\/a> on the jurors and leaving them to make sense of it.<\/span>

<\/span>McCulloch\u2019s office claims that this is a way to give more authority to the grand jurors, but it looks more like a way to avoid charging Wilson at all \u2014 and to use the grand jury as cover for the outrage that will ensue. It is often said that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich if a prosecutor asks it to. But the opposite is also true. A grand jury is less likely to deliver an indictment \u2014 even a much deserved one \u2014 if a prosecutor doesn\u2019t ask for it. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

McCulloch has done this before:<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 During his tenure, there have been at least a dozen fatal shootings by police in his jurisdiction (the roughly 90 municipalities in the county other than St. Louis itself), and probably many more than that, but McCulloch\u2019s office has not prosecuted a single police shooting in all those years. At least four times he presented evidence to a grand jury but \u2014 wouldn\u2019t you know it? \u2014 didn\u2019t get an indictment.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is rather unsurprising.<\/p>\n

DA’s don’t want to prosecute cops in the first place, they have to work with them, and McCulloch has a particularly bad record in terms of prosecuting police misconduct .<\/p>\n

The fix is in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has become patently transparent that even inside the beltway know-nothing Dana Milbank feels compelled to call this out: What happened in Ferguson, Mo., last month was a tragedy. What\u2019s on course to happen there next month will be a farce.October is when a grand jury is expected to decide whether to indict the white …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,972,1041],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-justice","category-law-enforcement-misconduct"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185646"}],"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=185646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185646\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}