Highly respected Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has looked at the prosecutor in Ferguson, Mo. and concluded that he is not likely to push the grand jury for an indictment. Milbank writes:
"It’s a good bet the grand jurors won’t charge him, because all signs indicate that the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, doesn’t want them to. . . .
". . . McCulloch’s office has declined so far to recommend any charges to the grand jury. Instead, McCulloch’s prosecutors handling the case are taking the highly unusual course of dumping all evidence on the jurors and leaving them to make sense of it.
"McCulloch’s 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 — 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 — even a much deserved one — if a prosecutor doesn’t ask for it."
Milbank further states that, during prosecutor McCulloch's 23 year tenure in the job, there have been at least a dozen fatal shootings by police officers, and McCoulloch's office has not prosecuted a single one of them.
We're not talking about a rush to conviction, only that a prosecutor ask a grand jury to find probable cause enough to have a trial to decided guilt/innocence. With the evidence so far available to the public, it seems almost an open and shut case of excessive use of force: an unarmed black teen was shot when he was running away from the police officer, and then shot again and killed after he had turned with his hands up in the air in an act of surrender.
If that does not warrant a trial, with evidence and arguments for and against guilt argued before a jury, then there is no justice for black people in St. Louis County. Let's hope that Milbank is wrong, that there will be a fair trial.
Ralph
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