Ferguson and the quest for justice
An awful lot of people seem to have strong opinions— pro and con— on whether Ferguson, Mo., police Officer DarrenWilson should have been indicted, and yet it’s a safe bet that few of them have actually looked at the evidence presented to the grand jury.
It wasn’t even possible to examine the evidence until after prosecuting attorney RobertMcCulloch’s press conferenceMonday, and yet many minds already were made up.
This rush to judgment is in part, of course, a reflection of the fact that the Ferguson case has become a proxy for longstanding social problems in America, and most obviously race relations. Nor is it hard to understand why. The small St. Louis suburb of Ferguson is a case in point. More than twothirds of its residents are black and yet its police force at the time thatWilson shot and killed Michael Brown in August had only three black officers.
Meanwhile, some residents have said they feel that police harass them with petty charges that have little to do with keeping the peace.
Yet the problem with seeing the Brown shooting mainly through the prism of race is that the fate of an actual human being is involved, someone who deserves justice no less than anyone else investigated for a possible crime. And that is why a dispassionate look at the evidence is simply not optional for those who seek to have their opinions taken seriously.
Either they are willing to put themselves in the grand jury’s shoes or they’re engaging in politics rather than the pursuit of truth.
Some of those critical ofMonday’s announcement have focused onMcCulloch’s decision to take the case to a grand jury in the first place. They claim he was seeking political cover and a way to avoid deciding on his own whether to press charges.
Maybe so. But more than one prosecutor we spoke with Tuesday pointed out that taking a difficult case to a grand jury can also be a way to seek buy-in from the larger community for whatever the ultimate decision may be.
Back in the early 1990s, Denver District Attorney Norm Early took a controversial police shooting to a grand jury— and he too was criticized by some for allegedly passing the buck. But as Early observed, “No matter what you do, there will always be individuals who willMonday-morning quarterback.”
The grand jury in that case did indict the officer on second-degree murder charges, although he was later acquitted at trial.
McCulloch is also being faulted for presenting the full range of evidence to the grand jury, although this seems a curious complaint.
In Colorado at least, former Gov. Bill Ritter told us, “We absolutely present pr0 and con evidence” to grand juries. After all, the former Denver DA noted, the prosecutor has to sign off on the grand jury’s findings, and he has an ethical duty to pursue cases that he has an expectation of being able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
If you only provide the grand jury with damning evidence, you risk being stuck with a case that hasn’t got a chance when it gets to trial.
Many Americans are obviously upset with the grand jury’s decision. Many others clearly support it. But this clash of opinions, we suspect, has less to do with what happened on a single day in Ferguson than many on both sides care to admit.