XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.society.liberalism, talk.politics.guns   
   XPost: alt.tasteless.jokes, misc.legal   
   From: moo@denver.edu   
      
   Lou Bricano  wrote in news:86AyM.42063$VPEa.23412@fx33.iad:   
      
   > By Randall D. Eliason   
   >   
   > Mr. Eliason is a   
      
   left-wing turd scribbler at Georgetown.   
      
   I'm not a lawyer. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the   
   majority of the Metropolitan’s readers are also not lawyers. And while   
   there are a few exceptions, I know most of my Facebook followers aren’t   
   lawyers.   
      
   And yet, there are many people who seem to be so sure of their   
   understanding about how a grand jury works, that they’re willing to take   
   any decision made at face value — as proof of innocence or guilt.   
      
   That’s not actually how a grand jury works. In a grand jury hearing, the   
   prosecution (usually only the prosecution) presents evidence in a relaxed   
   setting to the grand jury, who decide whether to issue an indictment ­­—   
   whether there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime. Since,   
   traditionally, the defense doesn’t get a say, it’s pretty easy to get a   
   grand jury to indict someone in most cases.   
      
   In fact, it’s so easy in most cases that a former New York state chief   
   judge, Sol Wachtler, famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a   
   grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.”   
      
   On a federal level (different than the state level, like in Ferguson,   
   Missouri, where most cases are brought before judges for an indictment   
   rather then grand juries), in 2010 (the last year for which we have   
   statistics), grand juries returned just 11 out of 162,000 violent crime   
   cases without an indictment, according to the FBI’s Bureau of Justice   
   Statistics.   
      
   There is one exception, and we saw it frequently in 2014: when a police   
   officer is charged with a crime, a grand jury only rarely returns an   
   indictment.   
      
   We saw this in action when a grand jury failed to indict Ferguson police   
   officer Darren Wilson for the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael   
   Brown, even on a charge of involuntary manslaughter. We saw it in New   
   York, when a grand jury failed to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in   
   the choking death of unarmed Eric Garner (an indictment was, however,   
   handed out for the man who videotaped Garner’s death, with about as much   
   difficulty as it would take to indict a ham sandwich).   
      
   According to research by Philip Stinson , an assistant professor of   
   criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, only 41 officers   
   in the United States were charged with murder or manslaughter between 2005   
   and 2011. Total numbers of officer-related shootings are unclear, as the   
   FBI’s report of 2,718 “justified homicides” by officers over the same   
   period is considered a low estimate, as police organizations aren’t   
   required to submit their records to this report.   
      
   So why the discrepancy? If it’s so easy to indict for violent crime, why   
   are so few officers indicted?   
      
   There’s a few theories. The first is that we’ve trained the public to   
   trust police officers. That trust can be necessary for those officers to   
   do their jobs, but it may be given too blindly: as the military   
   intelligence community put it when I was in the Air Force, “trust, but   
   verify.”   
      
   Since, in officer-involved shootings, the events are often the word of a   
   police officer carrying a public trust versus a victim, who are often busy   
   being dead and unable to defend themselves, grand juries may not give as   
   much credence to evidence against police officers than they do to ordinary   
   citizens.   
      
   Another possibility is that prosecutors, on whom much of the burden of   
   securing an indictment in a grand jury falls, are naturally reluctant to   
   push for the prosecution of the officers they have to work with, every   
   day, to enforce the law. This isn’t necessarily something that happens   
   consciously, but prosecutorial bias could easily be a factor, especially   
   if combined with juror bias.   
      
   Finally, a misunderstanding in the general public of the lower standards   
   of evidence needed to secure indictment, rather than the “beyond   
   reasonable doubt” required for a conviction, could result in confusion on   
   a jury — and certainly does in the court of public opinion.   
      
   Is there a way to fix this? Possibly, require a special prosecutor for all   
   grand jury investigations or indictment hearings involving a police   
   officer, to relieve prosecutors of the inherent conflict of interest in   
   attempting to indict their co-workers. Another would be to do away with   
   grand juries altogether, as a majority of the world has done, and bring   
   charges against officers to a full trial, where guilt or innocence can be   
   determined “beyond a reasonable doubt.”   
      
   Until we fix the problems with indictment in this country, justice won’t   
   be done. Innocence, or guilt, is not determined in a grand jury.   
      
   https://www.mymetmedia.com/indict-ham-sandwich/   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)