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Thread: The Ferguson Lie

  1. #1
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    Default The Ferguson Lie

    Americans may be a smart, educated people, but we are lazy and ignorant. It’s too much effort for our delicate sensibilities to gain a deeper understanding of how our nation functions. This is why the Ferguson Lie happened. This is why the Ferguson Lie works.

    That the grand jury did not indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson was a foregone conclusion. To those of us who don’t have to look up a study or read a law review article to understand how indictments happen in the real world, the outcome was clear when St. Louis County District Attorney Bob McCulloch announced that he would present all the evidence to the grand jury.

    Wachtler’s “ham sandwich” has grown trite in this discussion.

    The Ferguson Lie is an appeal to our sense of fairness and transparency. We were played. McCulloch’s lengthy spiel before announcing “no true bill” was to spread the lie. To the ear of the media, McCulloch’s pitch was appealing; the grand jury heard all the evidence. The grand jury transcript will be disclosed to provide complete transparency. Witnesses lied to the media, but the grand jury heard the truth. The grand jury saw the hard evidence. Nine whites and three blacks, so no one would think that the grand jury was denied the voice of people of color, sat on the grand jury, which met for 25 sessions and more than 70 hours of testimony.

    The grand jury did the dirty work that America needed done. The grand jury has spoken.

    This is the lie.

    The description of what happened with the grand jury, how it heard all the evidence, how it will be transparent, is intended to appease our innate sense of fairness. Americans love things that appear fair, even if we don’t quite understand what actual fairness means. This sounds as if it was done as well, as fairly, as it could possibly be done.

    But it’s a lie.

    “All the evidence” is a phrase that applies to a trial. A trial is a procedure that happens in an open courtroom, where adversaries zealously present their case and challenge the other side’s case. It is transparent because we can watch it unfold, develop, happen before our eyes. We hear the questions and answers, the objections and rulings. We hear the request to admit evidence and the voir dire and challenge to its admission. We hear the opening arguments and summations.

    McCulloch put on a play in Ferguson. His press conference announcing the foregone conclusion was remarkably in many ways, not the least of which was how he sold the argument for “no true bill” rather than the position he, as prosecutor, was duty-bound to champion. The man charged with prosecuting killers argued the case for not indicting Wilson.

    McCulloch didn’t have to go to the grand jury at all. He could have prosecuted Wilson by fiat had he wanted to do so. He did not.

    He was not going to be the person who charged Wilson with any variation of homicide. But in deciding to take the case to the grand jury, the lie was born.

    Whether Darren Wilson would have been convicted after trial remains unclear; perhaps the case against him for the killing of Michael Brown wouldn’t have survived scrutiny. Perhaps the structural benefits given law enforcement to kill without fear would have allowed him to circumvent conviction. Perhaps he wasn’t guilty. We will never know.

    The grand jury transcript offers little comfort. Those who explain that it’s transparency are lying to you. It’s all part of the Ferguson Lie. While it tells us what was presented, it doesn’t tell us what was not. It’s unchallenged, unquestioned and unquestionable evidence. There is no adversary in the grand jury to roar against its one-sided presentation.

    That it ended without the prosecutor asking the grand jury for an indictment is unheard of. By this omission, it ended with the prosecutor telling the grand jury that a close call goes to the defendant. It ended as it was meant to end, as the foregone conclusion demanded it end.

    The merit of the grand jury presentation relies entirely on our acceptance of Bob McCulloch’s office desiring an indictment against Darren Wilson. Just as a prosecutor can indict any damn person he pleases, he can similarly make sure a person is not indicted. He does so through subtle tricks. He does so through big lies. Like presenting “all the evidence.” Like the Ferguson Lie.

    Had the prosecution desired an indictment against Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, the presentment would have taken an hour, maybe two, and there would have been a true bill by close of business the next day, well before Michael Brown had been laid to rest. The grand jury isn’t the venue to present “all the evidence.” That’s what trials are for. The grand jury serves a very limited function, to determine whether sufficient evidence exists so that there is probable cause to proceed to trial.

    In Ferguson, the grand jury served a very different purpose. It was the mechanism by which the guardians of the status quo protect the American dream of an orderly society, where the appearance of challenge is preserved so that lazy and ignorant Americans can sleep well at night, secure in the belief that their officials and institutions are doing the job of protecting their comfort against the unsavory and the malcontents.

    This is the Ferguson Lie. Will America fall for it? Of course we will, just as we have so many times before. It’s too much work to do anything else. It’s always been too much work for Americans.

    http://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/11...-ferguson-lie/

  2. #2
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    With just enough rioting, arson and mayhem allowed to ensure that government grows...

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    She belittles the jury system at the end. Seriously, msnbc telling it like it is?????? come on.
    When the evidence is released, and the witness testimony is available, we will know enough to make a logical better informed stance.
    Educate others to grow our base of informed citizens, it's tyranny. Spread the Gospel.

    Prepare wisely individually. An army runs on it's stomach.

    Network with those who prepare wisely and take advantage of the strength in numbers and the economy of scale.

    Then, when the curtains come down and the truth is evident to an informed citizenry, we unite and fight the new world order.

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    Quote Originally Posted by ractivist View Post
    She belittles the jury system at the end. Seriously, msnbc telling it like it is?????? come on.
    When the evidence is released, and the witness testimony is available, we will know enough to make a logical better informed stance.
    In the grand opera, everyone has a part to play...

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    I meant to post this when I posted the video above, but I got distracted. This is a comment below the video at YouTube. Take it for what it's worth ...


    (1) The prosecutor for the case, Robert McCulloch, whose father was a police officer killed in the line of duty by a black man, has refused to recuse himself. Consider this: if he were an ordinary citizen being considered to sit on a jury in this trial, someone with his background would be dismissed immediately during voir dire.

    (2) McCulloch offered Officer Wilson the opportunity to argue his case to the grand jury, which is a problem for several reasons:

    [a] The prosecutor is supposed to push for prosecution. Instead of choosing to prosecute the case, file charges, and have a preliminary hearing -- all of which is standard procedure, all of which takes only a few days at most -- McCulloch opted to use a grand jury -- a lengthy process by itself, made longer by his refusal to offer them any instruction and advice on the charges they should consider. Keep in mind two things: defendants DO NOT have a right to testify in front of a grand jury, and defendants don't usually want to anyway because it gives the state a preview of what their defense will be. This is further evidence of McCulloch's bias. There is an old saying, "A district attorney (DA) can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich if he/she wants to".

    The prosecutor is supposed to be an advocate for the victim. As of Sep.18 2014,McCulloch has not yet subpoenaed any witnesses to testify in the Michael Brown shooting, yet he allowed Officer Wilson to do so and to do so FIRST.

    (3) Officer Wilson has been given an unfair and uncommon advantage in this case. Thus far, Officer Wilson has been (and may be) the only person allowed to testify before the grand jury.

    Assuming that witnesses are eventually subpoenaed to testify, by letting Officer Wilson go first, he has been given the opportunity to establish the narrative which puts him on the offense and everyone else on the defense. Keep in mind he's been allowed to testify with a blank police report AND after hearing all the evidence against him already.

    (4) If Officer Wilson is revealed to have testified in front of this grand jury before on an unrelated case and been found credible in the past, that would prejudice the jury in his favor.

    (5) The grand jury has been granted an additional 16 weeks to decide whether to issue an indictment. Why?? At this point, we've already heard from the witnesses, we've heard from Officer Wilson, and many of the important facts are known: Officer Wilson did the shooting, Michael Brown is dead. Multiple witnesses say his hands were up. Only Officer Wilson says otherwise. At present, there are 11 eyewitnesses to the shooting (that we know of) and they all say the same thing. There is video of the incident taken from multiple angles. Alleged audio of the actual gunshots. Autopsy reports which may be consistent with witness testimony. Yet some people want to act like there has been some kind of rush to judgment. When was the last time a prosecutor had multiple eyewitnesses to an incident, alleged audio recordings of it, an excessive amount of force used, and a body, and decided NOT to indict?

    It makes little sense that the police are still being given the benefit of doubt, considering their actions in this case thus far. MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell admitted that it's highly unusual for a police officer NOT to file an incident report immediately after a shooting and that, in his experience, it typically means a bad shoot. We know that the Ferguson Police Department has acted improperly before (ex. Henry Davis, Jack in the Box shooting). We know they've acted improperly here (ex. Ferguson riots). We know the courts and the police have colluded to abuse and impoverish Ferguson residents through excessive stops, excessive fines, and the creation of debtors’ prisons (see Democracy Now’s The War on the Poor in Ferguson).

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    The grand jury serves a very limited function, to determine whether sufficient evidence exists so that there is probable cause to proceed to trial.
    And once the obviously lying early witnesses were exposed by the forensic evidence and the real witnesses, some of whom were black, there wasn't.

    Mike Brown left one Darren Wilson with one choice: which one of them was gong to die. Wilson made the right choice.
    ---
    "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson, 1816

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    TruthSeeker

    There are plenty of instances of police overstepping the bounds of decency, violating constitutional rights, and just plain beating the **** out of innocents. Trying to hang your hat on this one is, well, just ****ing stupid, and makes you look more like an agenda-pimp than a rational person. The "Brown Incident" is exactly as it appears, a moron who made a piss-poor decision and smacked at a dog that had teeth.

    I say this out of respect, I really do.

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    Gabe Ortíz ‏@TUSK81 10h10 hours ago
    My God. This picture. RT @yamphoto Protester decides to take snapshot of the police officer she confronted. #Ferguson



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