An inconvenient truth

That would be because it is more pervasive. Blacks in particular are over-represented in the criminal justice system in the US due to over-policing and racial profiling. So why do you think the rate of deaths by police officers would be similar to whites who are killed by white police officers?

From incomplete data, in that without all of the available figures and with just what they could gather from Government sources from the few police departments who did report such killings:

The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.

One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring – 185, more than one per week.

ProPublica's risk analysis on young males killed by police certainly seems to support what has been an article of faith in the African American community for decades: Blacks are being killed at disturbing rates when set against the rest of the American population.

Our examination involved detailed accounts of more than 12,000 police homicides stretching from 1980 to 2012 contained in the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Report. The data, annually self-reported by hundreds of police departments across the country, confirms some assumptions, runs counter to others, and adds nuance to a wide range of questions about the use of deadly police force.​

It is a very very large disparity. And a disturbing one.

And it isn't just white officers. Black police officers were also killing teenagers and young men, many of whom are unarmed (black and white). With a majority of the population in the US being white, of course white victims of police violence will also be fairly hefty and terribly so. But black people are a minority in the US and the numbers against them is over-represented.

Overall, the figures are too high, regardless of race.

How many more young people have to be killed by the police before police departments implement better training to try to reduce the level of aggressiveness of their officers?

Give me a figure. Any figure. How many is an acceptable figure?

Let's just put it into some perspective.

In the past five years, more Utahns have been killed by police than by gang members.


Or drug dealers. Or from child abuse.
​

The numbers are not huge, but the problem remains the same.

Through October, 45 people had been killed by law enforcement officers in Utah since 2010, accounting for 15 percent of all homicides during that period.


A Salt Lake Tribune review of nearly 300 homicides, using media reports, state crime statistics, medical-examiner records and court records, shows that use of force by police is the second-most common circumstance under which Utahns kill each other, surpassed only by intimate partner violence.


Saturday’s shooting, which occurred after an officer responded to a trespassing call, remains under investigation.


Nearly all of the fatal shootings by police have been deemed by county prosecutors to be justified. Only one — the 2012 shooting of Danielle Willard by West Valley City police — was deemed unjustified, and the subsequent criminal charge was thrown out last month by a judge.​

Most disturbingly, police shooting of civilians are often investigated by their fellow officers and county prosecutors. Apparently conflict of interest does not enter the fray in such situations.

Comforting thought, isn't it?

What isn't comforting is the thought that we are becoming so used to this level of violence by law enforcement that it is just second nature and we expect that it is the norm. It shouldn't be the norm.

 

Hmm..

It's not that they did not meet their own standards of justice. The problem in this case is that they re-wrote the book altogether..

On Monday, Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced that a grand jury had decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown. But that decision was the result of a process that turned the purpose of a grand jury on its head.


Justice Antonin Scalia, in the 1992 Supreme Court case of United States v. Williams, explained what the role of a grand jury has been for hundreds of years.

It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.​

This passage was first highlighted by attorney Ian Samuel, a former clerk to Justice Scalia.


In contrast, McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours before the grand jury and presented them with every scrap of exculpatory evidence available. In his press conference, McCulloch said that the grand jury did not indict because eyewitness testimony that established Wilson was acting in self-defense was contradicted by other exculpatory evidence. What McCulloch didn’t say is that he was under no obligation to present such evidence to the grand jury. The only reason one would present such evidence is to reduce the chances that the grand jury would indict Darren Wilson.


Compare Justice Scalia’s description of the role of the grand jury to what the prosecutors told the Ferguson grand jury before they started their deliberations:

And you must find probable cause to believe that Darren Wilson did not act in lawful self-defense and you must find probable cause to believe that Darren Wilson did not use lawful force in making an arrest. If you find those things, which is kind of like finding a negative, you cannot return an indictment on anything or true bill unless you find both of those things. Because both are complete defenses to any offense and they both have been raised in his, in the evidence.
​

As Justice Scalia explained the evidence to support these “complete defenses,” including Wilson’s testimony, was only included by McCulloch by ignoring how grand juries historically work.

​

As Marjorie Cohn, a Professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law notes, McCulloch violated every single principle that Scalia noted in this case. And it was spectacularly disturbing and self serving. And may set a very bad precedent.

You know the fix is in when a suspect who shot an unarmed man voluntarily provides four hours of un-cross examined testimony to a grand jury without taking the Fifth.​

I have to admit, this was shocking. And it gets worse:

In a normal grand jury proceeding, the prosecutor presents evidence for a few days and then asks the grand jurors to return an indictment, which they nearly always do. Of 162,000 federal cases in 2010, grand juries failed to indict in only 11 of them, according the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The standard of proof for a grand jury to indict is only probable cause to believe the suspect committed a crime. It is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which is required for conviction at trial. Yet McCulloch's team presented testimony and documents to the panel for three months, evidence not subjected to adversarial testing by cross-examination.​

And worse:

The prosecutor did not ask these grand jurors for an indictment. They were left to sift through the evidence on their own, with no prosecutorial guidance about what to charge. Indeed, the transcripts indicated that prosecutors asked Wilson gentle, leading questions designed to bolster his self-defense claim. For example, a prosecutor told Wilson, "You felt like your life was in jeopardy," followed by, "And use of deadly force was justified at that point, in your opinion?" But prosecutors rigorously challenged witnesses who contradicted Wilson's testimony.

As the grand jury is a secret proceeding, with only the grand jurors and the prosecutor present, the grand jurors did not hear any cross-examination of the officer's testimony, or that of other witnesses (which is customary in an adversarial jury trial). These grand jurors, who were nearing the end of their term, which began in May, knew the drill, since they had sat on several other cases. They knew the prosecutor always asks for indictments. Thus, when the prosecutor handled the Wilson case in a radically different manner, this signaled to the grand jurors that they were not expected to indict. And they did not.

Another unorthodox aspect of this case was McCulloch's announcement of the grand jury's decision on national television. Sounding like a defense attorney delivering a closing argument in a jury trial, McCulloch characterized and analyzed the witness testimony in the light most favorable to the officer.
​

And worse still:

McCulloch has a history of bias in favor of police involved in altercations with black men. But, ignoring the pleas of 7,000 residents in and near Ferguson who signed a petition, McCulloch refused to recuse himself in the Wilson case.

McCulloch had mischaracterized testimony in a 2000 case in which two black men were killed after officers fired 21 shots at them. As in the Wilson case, the reasonableness of the officers' use of deadly force was critical. In the 2000 case, the officers said the two victims were driving toward them, trying to run them down, and McCulloch claimed that all the witnesses corroborated the officers' story. A later federal investigation, however, determined that the car was not moving forward, and that only three of the thirteen officers said the car was moving forward.

Likewise, Wilson's claim that Brown was "charging" at him when the officer fired the fatal shots into the top of Brown's bowed head was critical to the reasonableness of Wilson's use of deadly force. When McCulloch announced the grand jury's decision, he characterized the witnesses who testified that Brown was "charging" the officer as believable, but dismissed the testimony of witnesses who said Brown was surrendering. McCulloch sounded like a defense attorney, not a prosecutor charged with representing "the people," including Brown.​

But here the kicker was just how McCulloch favoured Wilson. Aside from leading questions in an unprecedented event that defies all legal logic and precedent and the simple fact that he failed in his duty to represent the people and instead moved heaven and earth, re-wrote the book to protect Wilson and blatantly withhold evidence, there was this gem:

Adachi also wrote, "Prosecutors never asked Wilson why he did not attempt to drive away while Brown was allegedly reaching through his vehicle window or to reconcile the contradiction between his claim that Brown punched the left side of his face and the documented injuries which appear on his right side."​

It was set up to fail and set up to defend Wilson. Frankly, McCulloch should face an investigation in his handling of this farce. And it is a farce.

 

That article you linked..

I can understand the outrage.

GRAND JURY INSTRUCTIONS

In their final instructions Friday, jurors were told they had to find two things: probable cause that Wilson committed any of the five possible offenses, and probable cause that he did not act in self defense.

They were given the statutes for all five potential crimes, ranging from second degree involuntary manslaughter to first-degree murder. They were also given the "justifications" that at trial could serve as a defense to those crimes: self-defense and justified use of force by a law enforcement officer. Lastly, they were provided with the statute for assault on a law enforcement officer.

Prosecutors did not guide jurors much on the statutes themselves — at least not from what is apparent from the transcripts.

But they did point out a legal quirk that jurors would have to navigate: Missouri's law for use of force is not consistent with a guiding U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the matter.

That U.S. Supreme Court case, Tennessee vs. Garner, says that an officer using deadly force against a fleeing felon must have probable cause that the felon poses a significant risk of harm to the officer or the community.

Missouri's deadly force law says that deadly force is justified if it is needed to immediately effect an arrest and if the felon has done one of the following:

• has committed or attempted to commit a felony OR

• is attempting to escape by use of a deadly weapon OR

• may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious injury unless arrested without delay

The "or" between each of those clauses is important. Ostensibly, under Missouri law, an officer could use deadly force only if it is needed to make the arrest of someone who has committed or attempted to commit a felony. But that's not what the nation's top court has ruled.

Prosecutors, in trying to explain this discrepancy to jurors, provided them with "a statement of the law" that tracked the relevant part of Missouri statute but also conformed to the Supreme Court ruling.

Alizadeh told them to take the copy of Missouri law that was provided to them at the start of the grand jury process and to fold it in half.

"What we have discovered, and (sic) we have been going along with this, doing our own research, is that the statute in Missouri does not comply with the case law."

Of the portion that does not conform, she said, "Ignore it totally."

When jurors started asking more technical questions, Alizadeh told them just to disregard the statute.

"We don't want to get into a law class," chimed in Sheila Whirley, the second prosecutor on the case.

Prosecutors also told jurors what to do if they decided Wilson should be charged, but couldn't reach nine votes in agreement on which charge applied.

"If you have nine people that vote indict on anything, then there will be an indictment," Alizadeh said. "What that indictment is we will deal with if that happens, but there was some question, well, is it kind of like a hung jury if we all can't agree on the charge. No."​

 

*Guffaw*

You made a funny.

They treated it like it was an actual trial. But it wasn't a trial. There was no cross examination of the evidence they decided to present. There was no push back against their telling the jury to completely ignore and disregard the law. There was no risk that he was going to incriminate himself (he did when he changed his testimony from what he had initially told police and that was also ignored) because it was set up for his success. And it was blatant and obvious.

I think it is hysterical that you think that was designed to work against him.

 

If it was a trial, certainly.

But this was not a trial. There was no cross examination, no questioning of the evidence Wilson's lawyers *cough* prosecutors *cough* decided to selectively provide. There was no cross examination of Wilson or his "story".

Most importantly, there was no one to tell Brown's story. Only a prosecutor who seemed hell bent to tell Wilson's story in a way and with leading questions to make sure that it was only his story that was told.

Except that he should not have been put on the stand.

Refer to posts above detailing Scalia's decision about putting the accused on the stand in front of a grand jury. It is not their job to determine his innocence. That is the role of a trial. However, this hearing ended up being a one sided trial, with only one person telling his story freely and anyone who tried to tell Brown's story was questioned, doubted and treated like a criminal on the stand.

Then of course comes the fact that the prosecutor was only interested in making sure that Wilson was not indicted. His job was actually to represent the people, which included Brown, the victim of the shooting. Not Wilson.

Certainly.

Now imagine having a trial where only one side gets to present its case and the other side is shut down, denied that right and the jury told that they should just ignore the law and precedence because it favours them for the jury to do so.

The role of the prosecutor is to seek an indictment. Why did he not do so in this case and why was he only interested in protecting the rights of the accused and doing everything he could, even re-writing the book and going against Scalia's ruling and putting Wilson on the stand?

In this instance, the prosecutor was acting like Wilson's defence attorneys. That was not what they were there for.

In that regard, they utterly failed in their duty to the people they supposedly represented in that court room, just as they failed their office.

Why was the prosecutor, acting solely in the best interest of the person he was there to try to indict.

It was a sham.