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Showing posts with the label grand jury

Grand Jury clearing of officers involved in Tamir Rice shooting indicative of how the system works

When you have high profile shootings where everyone tends to have an opinion and none seemed to be even slightly wishing to listen to the other sides, you get a well-thought out and programmed response from those whose job is to dispense equal justice within the law.  For those on the other side of that line, finding a reason to allow those officers a way out instead of jail is the only course of action they feel is best because of the situation that they find themselves in.  For those on the side of the line where voices are never heard and often ignored, the results is all the proof they need to demonize police , prosecutors and judges.  Both sides lack true conviction is making things right and neither wishes to see nothing but what they has deemed a clear victory.  In the end, no one wins, we all lose and none of us seem smart enough to know the difference. From the prosecutor’s side having to work closely with the police, they tend not to wish to alienate t...

National Bar Association sees holes in the Non-Indictment of Officer

In an article titled “ National Bar Association calls for Federal Charges against Darren Wilson ” by Onomastic for The Daily Kos it is reported that “In 2010, the last year for data on the number of federal criminal cases and grand jury decisions, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.  Newspaper accounts suggest, grand juries frequently decline to indict law-enforcement officials. A recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that “police have been nearly immune from criminal charges in shootings” in Houston and other large cities in recent years. In Harris County, Texas, for example, grand juries haven’t indicted a Houston police officer since 2004; in Dallas, grand juries reviewed 81 shootings between 2008 and 2012 and returned just one indictment. Last night, the National Bar Association, "the nation's oldest and largest national network of predominantly African-American attorneys and judges," is...

Looters of Ferguson ignores the lesson of Dr. Martin Luther King

Throughout the coverage of the shooting and killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, there has been major coverage of the race angle from the disparity of representation in the local government to comparisons of how cities that are not predominately black are governed but all the while, it appears that many have forgotten the lesson that was taught so long ago during the civil rights struggle and made famous by a Baptist preacher known as Martin Luther King. Lest we forget, Dr. King advocated non-violence and maintained that stance even after facing far much more law enforcement resistance than the residents and transplant face in Ferguson.  In an interview with one of the national news agencies, an interviewee was quoted as saying that the reason they were looting was to get justice and instead of those standing near this individual correcting him, they just nodded their heads in agreement.  Seeing and hearing this, I immediately was taken back to the time where e...