Not Ready For Prime Time

Who releases an incendiary grand jury verdict at 8:15pm (CST) on a Monday night? They practically had the decision in hand when they convened the grand jury, so why the prime time revelation? A smart prosecutor releases the verdict in the light of day, away from the metaphors of darkness.

This guy was not smart. He waited for prime time, I think, for his own self aggrandizement. "Fuck the night, common sense, and protesters- for I have a story to tell!"

Really it wasn't much of a story. The whole case seemed to befuddle him what with different people having different accounts of what happened and all. He's like a Legal Ken Doll declaring: "The law is HARD!" As someone on The Last Word with Laurence O'Donnell noted, with his approach as well as the grand jury's, we wouldn't be leading the world in incarcerated citizens. We would have empty prisons. He seemed to accept the "he said/she said" perspective of conflict. "Who's right? I have no fucking clue. But, we can't put a guy on trial if there's conflicting stories. How would we find out what happened?"

The thing is, better than 90% of criminal cases are plea bargained. A prosecutor decides- pretty much like Law And Order- if he can win a case in a trial. Most of the time he probably can but, whether he can or can't, a plea bargain is offered. "Plead guilty to this charge and do a year or we'll pursue this and you'll do life". No prosecutor is charged by the people with finding out "who did it". That's the job of the police. The prosecutor's job is to prove that the guy the cops picked up "did it". And that's whether he did it or not. The saying regarding grand juries is: "A prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich." In fact, in over 160,000 federal grand juries, only ELEVEN failed to return an indictment. Mind you, those, like the Ferguson case, were not trials as we think we know them. This was a question of "probable cause"- should they put Darren Wilson on trial? The no-brainer that probable cause is 160,000 other times....was suddenly a trial instead. And though there was conflicting testimony that should have prompted a trial in nearly 160,000 other cases, that conflicting information was somehow damning evidence in this one.

Well, another victory for persecuted white folks, I guess. How fitting that it happened during the 2014th installment of White History Year.