St. Louis County and the State of Missouri seem to be impervious to ridicule and criticism of their history, image and functioning from residents, as well as those outside the state. No amount of writing that I’ve done in this newspaper for decades could have educated the world about how backwards we are as the region’s response to the killing of Michael Brown Jr. has done. Now a spotlight is on our issues of police violence, economic injustice, government corruption and the lack of visionary leadership to address these challenges.
The grand jury process in the Darren Wilson case has become a glaring deviation of equal justice under the law and has helped many to see its inherent problems.
Most lay observers know that the grand jury is a tool of the prosecutor. Hence the popular phrase, coined in 1985 by New York Judge Sol Wachtler, that prosecutors have so much influence over grand juries that they could get them to “indict a ham sandwich.” In his argument to put the grand jury system in the trash bin of history, Judge Wachtler went on to say that he believed that grand juries “operate more often as the prosecutor’s pawn than the citizen’s shield.”
Grand juries have been become a mockery of a judicial system built on a system of class and race privilege. Nothing just or true or fair will come out of them. Yes, a mockery of a mockery.
When unarmed, young Mike Brown was killed by Ferguson cop Darren Wilson and left in the street for four and a half hours, it was clear that incompetency was the rule of the day. The quick and overpowering response by the community was yet another indication that this shooting was going to be different, thereby requiring a very different response from law and government officials.
None was forthcoming. St. Louis looked like it was just unprepared for prime time. It looked like we have a legal system and government that harkens back to pre-Civil Rights Movement days.
Let me not try to walk you through St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s fiasco of a grand jury process. Many with a better grasp of the law than me have dissected it like a frog in a biology class. There are more flaws than McCulloch’s bias in this high-profile case, given that his police officer father was killed by a young, black male.
We can start with the hours of testifying by Darren Wilson before the grand jury or the questionable testimony from dubious Witness 40 or the prosecutor’s misleading of the jury by giving them an outdated law on lethal force that was changed nearly 30 years ago by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
This latter raised so much clamor in legal circles that it forced Republican-turned Democrat Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster into the fray. Even Koster was forced to admit that the outdated Missouri law shouldn’t have been given to the jurors. He meekly suggested there is a “need to update Missouri’s use of deadly force statute.” Let’s see if an updated law passes through the Missouri legislature this upcoming session.
Shortly after McCulloch’s mockery of a grand jury, a New York grand jury failed to indict Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the choke-hold killing of Eric Garner. That grand jury had just about everything it needed to indict Pantaleo, including the videotape of a dying Garner begging for air. It’s clear that the grand jury system doesn’t see cops as ham sandwiches.
The point is, there’s no way to reform the grand jury system. I put grand juries right up there with the U.S. Electoral College. These instruments are leftovers from a Southern aristocracy and have no value in the 21st century. “End the grand jury system” is a legit demand.