I’m hearing a rumor that Darren Wilson’s indictment decision is going to be announced on Monday, and that he’s not going to be indicted. I must say that this news makes my usually cerebral approach to situations go out the window. I have a very strong visceral reaction to this possible outcome, and it’s not good. I keep having visions of him being gunned down in the street like a rabid dog who needs putting down. I cannot accept that this man isn’t going to ever appear before a jury. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.
As I laid out in a previous post, there was ample evidence presented for an indictment by the Ferguson police spokesman, in his very first press conference. No other piece of evidence need be presented to a grand jury in order to get an indictment.
At this point I have to let you know that I’ve served on a grand jury so I’m going to share some observations I made over the course of the month that I served (it was two days a week for three hours per day). The district attorney has complete control over what is presented to a grand jury. Defendants can appear if they choose to do so and they can bring an attorney, but their attorney can’t say anything. If the defendant chooses to appear, the district attorney can ask them questions. I learned that, as a defendant, presenting your case before a grand jury is a giant mistake. Defendants aren’t allowed to present evidence, so all they can really do is to deny what the district attorney has just told the grand jury. Defendants really come off looking like they’re lying, whether they are or not. Over the course of the month that I served, we heard approximately 15 – 20 cases. Of those, only two defendants came to testify. Any decent attorney won’t let their client to that, and it’s abundantly clear why letting them do it is a bad idea.
Since the deck is so thoroughly stacked in favor of the prosecutor, they almost always get an indictment. I think that my grand jury indicted all but two or three cases that we heard. And frankly, the people sitting on the grand jury are predisposed to indicting. I wasn’t, but more people in that room were inclined to indict than weren’t. I mean, a prosecutor wouldn’t be presenting a case against someone that did nothing wrong, right?
My point in sharing all of that with you is to let you know that I earnestly don’t know how it’s possible for a district attorney to fail to get an indictment. I live in New York City. We have over 500 district attorneys so I saw between 13 – 18 different district attorneys present cases. It became clear which ones were good and which ones weren’t because we had so many to compare. It almost didn’t matter if the DA was good. As I said, we indicted on all but two or three cases.
I cannot conceive of a DA failing to get an indictment against Darren Wilson on just the basis of the fact that the he and Mike Brown started the altercation with physical contact and that, by the time the last bullet was fired, there was thirty-five feet between them. This is not a fact that is in dispute, since the Ferguson PD spokesman gave us that information in his very first press conference. As I said in my earlier post, that distance opening up between the shooter and Mike Brown negates the validity of any claim of self defense. The greater the distance between them became, the lower the plausibility of self defense became. Remember, an indictment isn’t a guilty verdict, it’s merely a judgment that there is sufficient evidence against the defendant to go to court. An indictment is actually very far from a guilty verdict given the disparity of opportunity to present a case, between the defendant and the district attorney.
If Darren Wilson isn’t indicted, it will most definitely be because the DA didn’t want to indict him. I cannot accept that we live in a country where police officers routinely kill unarmed citizens and never face a jury for doing it. I simply can’t accept this. I can accept a bad verdict, but I cannot accept a system where a verdict is never allowed to be handed down. No rational person with a modicum of intelligence will see this as a good outcome.
There has literally been no case made by Darren Wilson, wherein he demonstrates his innocence. That motherfucker ran and hid like a feckless thug. In a million years, I don’t go into hiding if I’m being accused of something I didn’t do. I face the public and make my case, with the conviction of an innocent person. When it comes to shooting at an unarmed kid, he’s a tough guy but when it’s time to face the public and tell them his story, he becomes officer micro-testicles. He hasn’t given anyone any reason to believe he’s not a murderer, so anyone who does believe in his innocence is making a baseless choice. It’s an increasingly stupid choice.
Police officers used to reserve this type of behavior for minorities in poor neighborhoods who don’t have the means to seek justice, but that’s not the case anymore. They’re expanding their parameters of "dangerous looking people" to include white people. I don’t just mean homeless white people, they’ve always been disposable. I mean white people who look like this:
Okay, she was actually homeless after her parents died when she was a child and a series of other unfortunate events occurred in her life. But look at her. More and more white people who look like her are going to join the "shootable" class. And as their murderers join the "free from consequences" club, the tide will eventually turn in terms of the level of support these murdering cops get from the public. Mary’s murder, Jeremy Dear, killed her back in April. We’re still waiting for the completion of an investigation into what happened because these things take time, but mostly just when the shooter is a cop. This is one of the cases that prompted the Justice Department to look at Albuquerque PD. Jeremy, or officer motherfucker as I like to call him, had a little body camera malfunction at the very moment he was murdering Mary. This malfunction seems to have flummoxed even the manufacturer of the camera. They can’t explain why it wasn’t working when Mary was being murdered. Even more curious though, is the fact that officer motherfucker’s camera malfunctioned on three separate occasions when he happened to be accused of police brutality. Each time investigators went to look at the camera footage, there wasn’t any to be found. Huh. Poor officer motherfucker, his camera actually malfunctioned more than sixty times over the course of his time with Albuquerque PD. I guess some people just don’t have much luck with technology. Lucky for him though, that Albuquerque PD found nothing suspicious about those malfunctions (not even the three that coincided with excessive force complaints against him), so he got to keep his job and subsequently murder Mary.
These cops are a menace to society and eventually, even supporters of Darren Wilson will see that.
In the meantime, I’m probably going to continue having my fantasies about Darren Wilson being put down. I don’t anticipate ever feeling bad about those fantasies since they may well be the only times I feel a sense of justice regarding Mike Brown’s shooting.
