As much as I despise the rioters in Ferguson, and the race hustlers and news media that set them in motion and cheered them on, the killer cop going free because a grand jury said he should be just stinks. It makes the whole system look bad.
Grand juries are secret. It’s a very old story that they are manipulated by prosecutors. And cops across the country are killing too many people these days, many of them black, and we need to know why.
A trial in the Ferguson case would have helped us figure that out. Even if, as Reason magazine says, heck especially if, the cop walked free. At least there’d have been adversarial cross-examination of his and his supporting witness’s testimony. There isn’t anything remotely like that in a closed grand jury room.
Law professor Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy: “…there are strong reasons to be skeptical of a suspect’s [i.e. the cop’s] exculpatory claim to have acted in self-defense, just as there are reasons to be skeptical of a suspect’s exculpatory claim on any other legal basis. [But] all the grand jury is doing is making a probable cause determination, not ‘finding facts’ in a trial sense…”
Or as Reason’s Jacob Sullum concludes: “A public airing of the evidence, with ample opportunity for advocates on both sides to present and probe it, is what Brown’s family has been demanding all along. [Prosecutor] McCulloch took extraordinary steps to deny them that trial, thereby reinforcing the impression that the legal system is rigged against young black men and in favor of the white cops who shoot them.”
Indeed, it looks like a corrupt system is protecting its own.
Via Reason & the Volokh Conspiracy.
UPDATE: Likewise, New York City’s cigarette salesman Eric Garner should not have resisted arrest, but it was hardly necessary to kill him for it. Once again the local power structure (grand juries are not independent of politics) has decreed no sanctions against police for their independent decision to use capital punishment.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 