Are Missouri Dems engineering a Republican-style grand-jury report in the Ferguson case?

Demonstrators outside the Ferguson PD on August 30

by Ken

I don't know whether Ferguson (MO) police officer Darren Wilson should be indicted in the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, or if so what me should be indicted for. Rather obviously I don't have all the information or know all the relevant law.

The thing is, the St. Louis County grand jury now hearing the case is going to have masses of information and law dumped on them, but may not be in a much better position to answer thes e questions. What's disturbing, though, is the suggestion that "the fix is in," a possibility that worries Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank ("Ferguson traged becoming a farce"). "It’s a good bet the grand jurors won’t charge [Wilson]," Dana writes, "because all signs indicate that the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, doesn’t want them to."

Dana cites the report by the Post’s Kimberly Kindy and Carol Leonnig, "In atypical approach, grand jury in Ferguson shooting receives full measure of case," which notes that prosecutor McCulloch's office, quite unusually, apparently intends to make no recommendation to the grand jury, instead trusting to the jurors to make sense of all the information dumped on them.

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.

"One might give McCulloch the benefit of the doubt," says Dana, "if not for his background."

His father was a police officer killed in a shootout with a black suspect, and several of his family members are, or were, police officers. His 23-year record on the job reveals scant interest in prosecuting such cases. 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’s office has not prosecuted a single police shooting in all those years. At least four times he presented evidence to a grand jury but — wouldn’t you know it? — didn’t get an indictment.

Dana takes a closer look at one of the four cases when McCulloch did present evidence to a grand jury but didn't get an indictment --

A 2000 case in which a grand jury declined to indict two police officers who had shot two unarmed black men 21 times while they sat in their car behind a Jack in the Box fast-food restaurant. It was a botched drug arrest, and one of the two men killed hadn’t even been a suspect. McCulloch at the time said he agreed with the grand jury’s decision, dismissing complaints of the handling of the case by saying the dead men “were bums.” He refused to release surveillance tapes of the shooting. When those tapes were later released as part of a federal probe, it was discovered that, contrary to what police alleged, the car had not moved before the police began shooting.

For the record, McCulloch -- although declining to withdraw from the new case -- has distanced himself from it by having other attorneys in his office do the presenting to the grand jury, and he presumably won't try the case himself in the event that there's a case to try. Still, Dana notes that his spokesman, "asked by The Post’s Wesley Lowery about those remarks," said that the slain men "should have been described as 'convicted felons' rather than 'bums.' " Pointing out that the Post's Wesley Lowery "gained national attention last month when he was unjustly detained by Ferguson’s out-of-control police while covering the demonstrations," Dana notes:

He has since asked McCulloch’s office for a list of cases in which prosecutors pursued charges against a law enforcement official. McCulloch’s office ultimately came up with only one case over 23 years that The Post could verify of the prosecution of a white officer for using inappropriate force against a black victim, and it wasn’t a shooting.

Then there's the awkward political dimension to the case. If you suspect that the political actors involved are Republicans, gaming the system to produce a Republican result, the facts, alas, are otherwise. "Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon — like McCulloch, a Democrat — is refusing to appoint a special prosecutor," and "Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill has issued a statement in support of McCulloch. Dana doesn't claim to know any more than I do what Darren Wilson is guilty of, and he understands that "proving a case of excessive force against a police officer is difficult."

But that doesn’t justify declining to prosecute such cases. There’s no dispute that Brown ran away after Wilson shot him in a scuffle and that Wilson shot Brown several more times after that. Several witnesses — including those in a newly discovered video showing the immediate aftermath of the shooting — claim that Brown had his hands up in surrender. The alternative account offered by Wilson — Brown charged at him — requires us to believe that the unarmed and wounded man ran away, reconsidered and ran back toward the man pointing a gun at him.

And McCulloch won’t have his prosecutors recommend even involuntary manslaughter? If he persists and if the governor won’t intervene, their behavior will confirm suspicions that justice is rigged.

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