McCullach, the prosecutor in Ferguson, said, in his press
conference, that it was almost impossible to convict a police officer with the
laws as they are now. This was, of course, the most ragged of excuses to throw
over his pantomime performance and he led the grand jury to the conclusion he
wanted: no trial for Darren Wilson. That
he wanted not to prosecute Darren Wilson has become glaringly obvious from all
we know about grand juries and his behavior at this one:
“It looks like he wanted to
create the appearance that there had been a public trial when in fact there
hadn’t been,” Noah Feldman, who teaches constitutional law at Harvard, said by
telephone on Tuesday. The impression that was left, Mr. Feldman added, “was
that the prosecutor didn’t want an indictment — and didn’t want to blamed for
not getting one.”
However, his excuse has been picked up by various liberal commentors,
who tell us, more in sorrow than anger, that the grand jury was never going to
indict a police officer. Case in point is Jamelle Bouie, who cites the laws and
the court decisions that give a wide latitude to police officers in their use
of violence. And of course the FBI stats of 410 justifiable officer caused
killings turn up (oddly, the much better statistics kept by the KilledbyPolice
organization are never cited in the establishment media. Here the politics of
Iraq is reversed – in the latter case, the lower death count that came with
merely counting deaths from news items were used, rather than the higher death
count derived by normal statistical methods used by a team that published in
the Lancet – here, the media count is ignored and the FBI numbers are touted
because the FBI numbers are lower).
However, going through the numbers, while an important
exercise, shouldn’t lead us to conclude that police officers are never indicted
by the grand jury. As a counter-example to Bouie’s thesis, look at a trial that
happened just last year in Virginia.
Patricia Cook, 56,
of Culpepper Virginia was a Sunday school teacher. She was sitting in her car
in the
parking lot of a church. This seemed suspicious to police officer Daniel
Harmon-Wright. He claimed he approached her and she rolled down the window and
he asked for her licence. When she didn't give it he grabbed her wallet, and
she rolled up the window and started moving off, dragging him, so he shot her
dead with seven shots. Or such was his story. But perhaps because she was a sunday
school teacher, white, and Officer Harmon-Wright, because of a drinking
problem, had enemies in the department, and perhaps because his mother, who was
secretary to the chief, was caught trying to delete negative things from his
file - for one reason or another, he was actually prosecuted properly. And
although he claimed at his trial that he was just trying to defend the public
security, other witnesses said that he never had his hand stuck in the car
window and that he ran behind the car and fired his seven shots that way. The
upshot was that he was put away for three years. See, it can be done. A, the
victim must be a white sunday school teacher, and b., the cop must have enemies
in the department. But it can be done.
So remember Harmon-Wright’s story the next time you read
some rightwinger tell you that Michael Brown threatened Darren Wilson’s life. Because
in a real trial, that story would be subject to questioning and, with a real prosecutor, could be largely
discredited. Of course, in a real trial, the prosecutor would try to pick a
jury that was not predisposed to acquit, as well.
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