That appears to be what was done to the grand jury on the Darren Wilson matter. I use the word matter deliberately, and you will see why later. Based on what the ‘prosecutor’ (I use that term very loosely in this instance) said in his tedious and meandering press conference last night, the grand jury in this case were presented with a mountain of exculpatory evidence. If you’re not familiar with the term, exculpatory evidence is evidence that points to the innocence of a defendant on trial. When a defendant is on trial, the prosecutor has an obligation to turn over all exculpatory evidence that they uncover, to the defense attorney. They are literally bound by the law to turn over any evidence they come across that may prove that a defendant is innocent.
There is no such obligation when presenting a case to a grand jury. In fact, the grand jury process is actually designed to block the presentation of any exculpatory evidence. As I said in an earlier post (read it, I explain a lot about the grand jury process in it), I served on a grand jury for a month. I never heard any exculpatory evidence from a prosecutor. A grand jury is not a trial. I’ve seen a lot of comments from a lot of people who have strong opinions on what happened last night. Unfortunately, most of those opinions came from people whose desire to put forth an opinion didn’t appear to be commensurate with a desire to learn anything they should probably learn in order to form said opinion. They all seem to have confused this process with a trial. These are what I refer to as the simpletons. I like to look at facts and then form an opinion. Simpletons like to do it the other way around. They’re usually so determined to do it the other way around, that they will reject any facts that interfere with that rectally generated opinion. Sorry, I digress. I’m extra bitchy this morning, what with the mega dose of stupid I had to endure last night.
The purpose of a grand jury is not to determine if the accused is guilty. The sole purpose of a grand jury is to determine if there’s enough evidence to determine if the accused guilty. There was clearly enough evidence against Darren Wilson to indict and let a jury decide if he was guilty of anything. If the only piece of evidence presented to the jury was that the altercation began in close contact, and ended with a distance of thirty-five feet when the fatal bullet was shot, they had enough evidence. You don’t need to know anything else to know that a jury should see all of the evidence to decide his guilt or lack of guilt. Thirty-five feet is clearly not a case of self defense, and no rational person would make that assertion.
Contrary to what the simpletons think, we were not at the determining innocence or guilt stage of this process yet. I have always asserted that we need to get to that point in the judicial process in this, and all cases when a police officer shoots an unarmed person. We never get to that stage of the process. Cops who shoot unarmed people almost never (I can’t think of one in the past five years) have to face a jury, and that’s very bad for all of us. Every time a simpleton advocates for truncating the justice system for a cop who shoots someone, they encourage more cops to overreact by shooting early and often.
I cannot believe this needs to be explained.
It really does take a special breed of stupid not to realize that. But it’s also much worse than that because these morons are advocating for throwing out our entire justice system by empowering cops to administer the death penalty whenever they deem fit. None of the stupid people who made their stupid judgments last night were able to explain which of Mike Brown’s alleged actions would earn him the death penalty in court. I guess that’s just another inconvenient question that impedes the stupid, baseless opinion process they hold more dear than their own safety and security.
Stupid.
I cannot use that word enough.
Here’s how deep the stupid runs; I was accused of making a snap judgment over and over again last night. Me? Judgment? For insisting on a trial to determine if Wilson was guilty or not? I’m accused of making a snap judgment by people who, without a trial, decided that he did nothing wrong. That’s rich.
And stupid.
That’s all. I’m done.
Stupid.
