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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Salon
http://slnm.us/K3LQXDb
Tuesday, Nov 25, 2014 3:25 AM UTC
White supremacy lives on: Ferguson decision confirms absence of legal & moral justice
With "no indictment" announced against Darren Wilson, a perverted natural order of things was affirmed. Here's why
Falguni A. Sheth Follow
Topics: Ferguson, michael brown, darren wilson, Race, Racism, Police, police militarization, Jay Nixon, Missouri, st. louis, Criminal Justice, Editor's Picks, Politics News
White supremacy lives on: Ferguson decision confirms absence of legal & moral justice
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch. (Credit: MSNBC)
For days, large swaths of the U.S. and the globe waited to hear whether or not the grand jury would indict Office Darren Wilson. For a week, Missouri governor Jay Nixon had declared a state of emergency, calling out the National Guard to “maintain peace and protect those exercising their right to free speech.” Today, he repeated the same message.
“Together we are all focused to make sure that the necessary resources are at hand to protect lives, to protect business and to protect free speech.”
Given the record of arrests by Ferguson police of protestors and reporters, Nixon’s message was fairly simple to translate: he anticipated—correctly–that the grand jury would not indict Darren Wilson. Nixon’s fear was that in such a case, Black Americans’ ire at that decision would explode in violence and potentially violate the lives, businesses, and “free speech” not of black protestors, but of white denizens. Nixon hadn’t said it, but his assumption of violence reinscribed the assumption of Black madness, of the lack of rationality. “Protest” could only be irrational, because it would challenge the “natural order of things,” to paraphrase 17th century French economist François Quesnay. In his very actions, he all but indicated, what most of us knew and feared—that the grand jury would not indict Darren Wilson. And for Nixon, the Ferguson police, and the white residents of Ferguson that is as it should be.
The natural order, for Gov. Nixon, is one in which police violence will continue to be seen as “stopping criminals,” and preserving “freedom” for the whites of Ferguson. In the meantime, the Black citizens of Ferguson and their supporters across the globe will ascribe an enormous, though rather different, symbolism to the verdict: no indictment confirms the continued absence of legal—and indeed, moral justice.
Yet, it is hard to imagine that even had the grand jury indicted, that their decision would have much of an effect on the institutional, deeply-embedded problem of state-endorsed, police-led racial violence in Ferguson, St. Louis, or anywhere else in the U.S.
The indictment itself is supposed to be an indication of whether there appear to be sufficient grounds for putting Wilson on trial. In the event that the grand jury had indicted, a trial itself, guaranteed to be a long arduous process, would most likely not have had a very satisfactory outcome. In the even more unlikely—and far away—case that the trial were to have found Wilson to be guilty of having killed Brown unjustly, at most, one police officer would have been convicted for one act. A guilty legal verdict, in effect, would have been just that: a lone legal verdict in one case involving one Black teenager and one white police officer.
Symbolically, such a guilty verdict could have been a start. In a society where many Black Americans who have too keen an awareness of the history of racism, the “natural order of things” is, I suspect, precisely what many of us hoped to see overturned through an indictment—and possibly a guilty verdict in a trial for Darren Wilson. That “natural order of things” is the continued foundation of unjust economic rules, systemic racism, white supremacy. Yet, it is obscured under the universal, race-neutral promise of “equality and freedom for all,” distracting us from the racial bias that grounds “reasonable standards,”–where standards are reasonable only for those who stand on the side of white supremacy, land, and profit. Similarly, justice is thought to be the outcome of “due process,” in which process is only afforded to those who can afford the dues.
Yet neither an indictment nor a conviction of Darren Wilson would have given Black Americans, or other populations of color what is so urgent: A court system that sees the history of racial injustice through serial acts of police violence, that processes justice by taking into full account the history of slavery, and that of racial, political, and economic segregation. Neither an indictment nor a conviction would have afforded long-term racial justice, in which police officers no longer represent the white ruling class of Ferguson, in which the governor of Missouri doesn’t send the National Guard to shut down the speech and protests of those who are the victims of racism. That form of racial justice—regardless of the decision not to indict—will need much more. It will need the cultural, legal, and economic defeat of white supremacy. And that is a much longer, much larger struggle.
Falguni A. Sheth
Falguni A. Sheth, a professor of philosophy and political theory at Hampshire College, writes about politics, race, and feminism at translationexercises.wordpress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @FalguniSheth.
Last edited by untanglingwebs on Tue Nov 25, 2014 12:44 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Mon Nov 24, 2014 10:56 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/24/bob-mcculloch-ferguson_n_6215986.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics
Ferguson Prosecutor Robert McCulloch Gives Bizarre Press Conference
The Huffington Post | By Alana Horowitz
posted: 11/24/2014 10:04 pm EST Updated: 31 minutes ago
St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch announces the grand jury's decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year old, on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, at the Buzz Westfall Justice Center in Clayton, Mo. (AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Cristina Fletes-Boutte, Pool)
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch announced on Monday night that Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in a press conference that many found baffling, unwieldy and inflammatory.
McCulloch said the grand jury "gave up their lives" while deliberating.
The prosecutor also repeatedly lashed out at the media, blaming the internet and "the 24-hour news cycle" for the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, where Brown was shot and killed in August. He continued talking for several minutes before revealing the much-anticipated grand jury decision.
“The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24-hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something, for anything to talk about, following closely behind with the non-stop rumors on social media,” he said.
Media figures and social media users lashed out at the notion that cable news and Twitter were to blame for the tension in the months following Brown's death, rather than the death itself.
"Social media isn't the problem," author Maureen Johnson said. "Shooting children is the problem."
CNN legal expert Jeffrey Toobin called the press conference "an extended whine" and "entirely inappropriate and embarrassing."
Also on HuffPost: |
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Mon Nov 24, 2014 10:59 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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| I watched the press conference and it appeared that the Prosecutor emphasized confronting potential witnesses with his version of the "physical evidence" and coercing them to change their statements to fit the scenario the prosecutor was advocating. |
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Mon Nov 24, 2014 11:02 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/11/24/3596621/in-powerful-video-legal-experts-explain-why-the-grand-jury-in-ferguson-was-set-up-for-failure/
Legal Experts Explain Why The Ferguson Grand Jury Was Set Up For Failure
by Judd Legum Posted on November 24, 2014 at 9:10 pm
In this video, two experienced attorneys explain what, in their view, are serious flaws with the grand jury process in the Darren Wilson case. The lawyers, St. Louis University law professor Susan McGraugh and Jerryl T. Christmas, a defense attorney and former prosecutor in St. Louis, are unsparing in their criticism of county prosecutor Bob McCulloch. (Christmas has participated in protests following Brown’s death.)
Specifically, McGraugh and Christmas question McCulloch’s unusual decision to present “all evidence” to the grand jury. Typically, prosecutors present to the grand jury only the evidence necessary to establish probable cause. (A grand jury does not determine guilt or innocence but only if a reasonable jury could find the defendant guilty.) McGraugh and Christmas are especially critical of McCulloch’s decision to allow Wilson to testify for hours in front of the grand jury.
McGraugh and Christmas emphasized that, when a prosecutor truly wants to get an indictment from a grand jury, it is usually very simple to do so. |
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Tue Nov 25, 2014 12:00 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/ferguson-michael-brown-indictment-darren-wilson/
Ferguson
It’s Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson’s Just Did
9:30 PMNov 24 By Ben Casselman
A St. Louis County grand jury on Monday decided not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police Officer Darren Wilson in the August killing of teenager Michael Brown. The decision wasn’t a surprise — leaks from the grand jury had led most observers to conclude an indictment was unlikely — but it was unusual. Grand juries nearly always decide to indict.
Or at least, they nearly always do so in cases that don’t involve police officers.
Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.
Wilson’s case was heard in state court, not federal, so the numbers aren’t directly comparable. Unlike in federal court, most states, including Missouri, allow prosecutors to bring charges via a preliminary hearing in front of a judge instead of through a grand jury indictment. That means many routine cases never go before a grand jury. Still, legal experts agree that, at any level, it is extremely rare for prosecutors to fail to win an indictment.
“If the prosecutor wants an indictment and doesn’t get one, something has gone horribly wrong,” said Andrew D. Leipold, a University of Illinois law professor who has written critically about grand juries. “It just doesn’t happen.”
Cases involving police shootings, however, appear to be an exception. As my colleague Reuben Fischer-Baum has written, we don’t have good data on officer-involved killings. But newspaper accounts suggest, grand juries frequently decline to indict law-enforcement officials. A recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that “police have been nearly immune from criminal charges in shootings” in Houston and other large cities in recent years. In Harris County, Texas, for example, grand juries haven’t indicted a Houston police officer since 2004; in Dallas, grand juries reviewed 81 shootings between 2008 and 2012 and returned just one indictment. Separate research by Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip Stinson has found that officers are rarely charged in on-duty killings, although it didn’t look at grand jury indictments specifically.
There are at least three possible explanations as to why grand juries are so much less likely to indict police officers. The first is juror bias: Perhaps jurors tend to trust police officer and believe their decisions to use violence are justified, even when the evidence says otherwise. The second is prosecutorial bias: Perhaps prosecutors, who depend on police as they work on criminal cases, tend to present a less compelling case against officers, whether consciously or unconsciously.
The third possible explanation is more benign. Ordinarily, prosecutors only bring a case if they think they can get an indictment. But in high-profile cases such as police shootings, they may feel public pressure to bring charges even if they think they have a weak case.
“The prosecutor in this case didn’t really have a choice about whether he would bring this to a grand jury,” Ben Trachtenberg, a University of Missouri law professor, said of the Brown case. “It’s almost impossible to imagine a prosecutor saying the evidence is so scanty that I’m not even going to bring this before a grand jury.”
The explanations aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s possible, for example, that the evidence against Wilson was relatively weak, but that jurors were also more likely than normal to give him the benefit of the doubt. St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch has said he plans to release the evidence collected in the case, which would give the public a chance to evaluate whether justice was served here. But beyond Ferguson, we won’t know without better data why grand juries are so reluctant to indict police officers.
BENCASSELMAN2_LIGHT
Ben Casselman @bencasselman
Ben Casselman is FiveThirtyEight’s chief economics writer. |
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Tue Nov 25, 2014 12:23 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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| See more at Dog Eat Dog Political on Facebook |
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Tue Nov 25, 2014 12:24 am |
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