Moo Denver
2023-08-02 23:17:02 UTC
By Randall D. Eliason
Mr. Eliason is a
left-wing turd scribbler at Georgetown.Mr. Eliason is a
I'm not a lawyer. Im going to go out on a limb and guess that the
majority of the Metropolitans readers are also not lawyers. And while
there are a few exceptions, I know most of my Facebook followers arent
lawyers.
And yet, there are many people who seem to be so sure of their
understanding about how a grand jury works, that theyre willing to take
any decision made at face value as proof of innocence or guilt.
Thats not actually how a grand jury works. In a grand jury hearing, the
prosecution (usually only the prosecution) presents evidence in a relaxed
setting to the grand jury, who decide whether to issue an indictment
whether there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime. Since,
traditionally, the defense doesnt get a say, its pretty easy to get a
grand jury to indict someone in most cases.
In fact, its so easy in most cases that a former New York state chief
judge, Sol Wachtler, famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a
grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
On a federal level (different than the state level, like in Ferguson,
Missouri, where most cases are brought before judges for an indictment
rather then grand juries), in 2010 (the last year for which we have
statistics), grand juries returned just 11 out of 162,000 violent crime
cases without an indictment, according to the FBIs Bureau of Justice
Statistics.
There is one exception, and we saw it frequently in 2014: when a police
officer is charged with a crime, a grand jury only rarely returns an
indictment.
We saw this in action when a grand jury failed to indict Ferguson police
officer Darren Wilson for the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael
Brown, even on a charge of involuntary manslaughter. We saw it in New
York, when a grand jury failed to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in
the choking death of unarmed Eric Garner (an indictment was, however,
handed out for the man who videotaped Garners death, with about as much
difficulty as it would take to indict a ham sandwich).
According to research by Philip Stinson , an assistant professor of
criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, only 41 officers
in the United States were charged with murder or manslaughter between 2005
and 2011. Total numbers of officer-related shootings are unclear, as the
FBIs report of 2,718 justified homicides by officers over the same
period is considered a low estimate, as police organizations arent
required to submit their records to this report.
So why the discrepancy? If its so easy to indict for violent crime, why
are so few officers indicted?
Theres a few theories. The first is that weve trained the public to
trust police officers. That trust can be necessary for those officers to
do their jobs, but it may be given too blindly: as the military
intelligence community put it when I was in the Air Force, trust, but
verify.
Since, in officer-involved shootings, the events are often the word of a
police officer carrying a public trust versus a victim, who are often busy
being dead and unable to defend themselves, grand juries may not give as
much credence to evidence against police officers than they do to ordinary
citizens.
Another possibility is that prosecutors, on whom much of the burden of
securing an indictment in a grand jury falls, are naturally reluctant to
push for the prosecution of the officers they have to work with, every
day, to enforce the law. This isnt necessarily something that happens
consciously, but prosecutorial bias could easily be a factor, especially
if combined with juror bias.
Finally, a misunderstanding in the general public of the lower standards
of evidence needed to secure indictment, rather than the beyond
reasonable doubt required for a conviction, could result in confusion on
a jury and certainly does in the court of public opinion.
Is there a way to fix this? Possibly, require a special prosecutor for all
grand jury investigations or indictment hearings involving a police
officer, to relieve prosecutors of the inherent conflict of interest in
attempting to indict their co-workers. Another would be to do away with
grand juries altogether, as a majority of the world has done, and bring
charges against officers to a full trial, where guilt or innocence can be
determined beyond a reasonable doubt.
Until we fix the problems with indictment in this country, justice wont
be done. Innocence, or guilt, is not determined in a grand jury.
https://www.mymetmedia.com/indict-ham-sandwich/