Tag: grand jury

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News The Fly-By

Grand Jury Secrecy Questioned in Wake of Stewart Case

A secret group got secret information about a very public matter. They formed a secret opinion, which was made public, but all of their other secrets will remain secret. Public officials herald this secrecy, noting that it shows the system works.

The shooting death of Darrius Stewart remains a mystery to most in Memphis. Few know what really happened. But members of a Memphis grand jury know. This secret group recently heard secret details of Stewart’s shooting death by Memphis Police officer Connor Schilling.

Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich very publicly asked the grand jury to indict Schilling on charges of voluntary manslaughter — the intentional killing of another under adequate provocation or “in the heat of passion” — and of firing his weapon during a “dangerous felony.” The grand jury indictment would have given Weirich permission to put Schilling on public trial for the charges.

But in an instance that experts call “rare,” the grand jury denied the D.A.’s request altogether, apparently unconvinced that Schilling had done anything wrong. That was that for Schilling, as far as the Shelby County criminal justice system is concerned.

This left many in Memphis scratching their heads. Weirich must have known it would. She spent a chunk of a news conference last week explaining the basics of the grand jury system to reporters and handed out a fact sheet that called the system “one of the most important, yet least understood aspects of the criminal justice system.”

When pressed by reporters, Weirich stressed the fact that she wanted the indictment but that the grand jury is an independent body: “They don’t work for me. They don’t work for the D.A.’s office. They are selected from the community.”

But her statement isn’t enough to convince some in Memphis. Josh Spickler, the executive director of Just City, a group advocating for criminal justice reform in Memphis, said it is rare that such a case wouldn’t get an indictment, “especially when it’s a case that’s strong enough for the top elected law enforcement official in the county to ask for a particular charge.”

“It’s a whole lot to ask of us to accept that a white police officer, who [Weirich] wanted to indict, was not indicted and that you’ve done the best you can do,” Spickler said.

He called getting a grand jury indictment “routine,” and even Weirich’s handout noted grand jurors return more than 10,000 indictments a year “ranging from shoplifting to first-degree murder.”

For years, legal groups, including the American Bar Association (ABA) and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, have pushed for reform of the grand jury system.

The ABA notes that grand juries are closely guided by prosecutors, though Weirich has said case officers, not prosecutors in her office, work with grand juries. No judge oversees the proceedings, and lawyers for those under investigation play no role in the hearings, according to the ABA, “meaning that the grand jury makes its findings without hearing both sides of the case.”

“Today some legal observers fear that grand juries have become simply a tool of prosecutors and that grand jurors have lost their independence,” reads an ABA statement.

Spickler said the Shelby County grand jury system indicts a “disproportionately high percentage” of African-American men and that “99.9 percent” of the people grand juries do indict here are not police officers.

“It’s just too much,” he said. “It’s just too much to accept that the grand jury system worked [in the Stewart case].”

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Prosecution Rests

Like many Americans, I watched St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch make his announcement on television Monday night regarding the Michael Brown/Darren Wilson case. And like many Americans, I wasn’t surprised that the grand jury decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson, nor was I surprised at the unrest that followed.

The signs had been clear. For days in advance of the announcement, we’d heard and read stories about an increased police and National Guard presence in St. Louis. The Ku Klux Klan had announced they’d be there to help stir the pot. Protestors had been organizing for weeks. The kettle was simmering, just waiting for the heat to be kicked up a notch. McCulloch’s announcement was all that was needed.

As any lawyer will tell you, prosecutors use grand juries to build a case for indictment, which sends the case to trial. They are not obligated to present both sides of the story, and they seldom do. And it is a rare grand jury that does not indict when presented with prosecutorial evidence. For example, prosecutors at the federal level pursued more than 160,000 cases in 2009-2010 (the most recent available data), and grand juries voted not to return an indictment in 11 cases. If a prosecutor wants a grand jury to indict, they will, literally 99.9 percent of the time.

It was quite apparent, given his long recitation of evidence supporting Wilson’s story, that McCulloch did not want to prosecute. And it’s true, police have the right under law to shoot to kill if they feel their safety or the safety of others is threatened. That’s pretty much a “get-out-of-prosecution-free” card, unless there’s strong evidence to the contrary, especially given the symbiotic relationship between prosecutors and police.

There’s a reason those photo-ops for drug busts and gang arrests always feature the district attorney and the police chief standing side by side. Cops need the district attorney to validate their arrests by prosecuting the offenders, and district attorneys need cops to testify in their prosecutions.

So why go through the charade? Why not just say there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute? And why, for heaven’s sake, would you make the announcement at 8:30 p.m., when crowds are most likely to be able to gather and when darkness provides cover for looters, making the situation more dangerous for the police, businesses, legitimate protestors, and citizens just wanting to stay safe in their homes? Wouldn’t common sense suggest a better time might be, say, 8:30 a.m.?

There are many questions lingering around this story, and many witnesses and much evidence that will never see a courtroom, and that’s where the frustration comes from. It’s possible that Wilson’s story would have held up in court, and it’s also possible that a forthright prosecutor could have torn holes in his story. Now we’ll never know. The truth is lost in the fire and tear gas and darkness of night.

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Editorial Opinion

After Ferguson …

CREDIT: St. Louis Public Radio

St. Louis Public Radio

We are tempted to say there are no easy answers. Or is that too easy an answer? As we go to press, in the wake of a Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, chaos has descended once more on Ferguson, the St. Louis suburb where the shooting of the unarmed black youth occurred in August. Even the first reports of arson, looting, and actual and potential violence made it clear that the reaction this time was more serious than the relatively controlled protests that occurred at the time of the shooting. 

And perhaps more general. Even before the grand jury’s decision was known, there had been widespread apprehension in other places. Advance emergency preparations had been made by local governments everywhere, including Memphis and Shelby County. 

There had been fears that the testimony and other proceedings of the grand jury would remain sealed — a circumstance that surely would have fueled the discontent. But the transcripts have been released, and the story they tell indicates that Officer Wilson underwent something less than relentless interrogation.

That won’t help assuage the sense of violation that is clearly felt, not only by the African-American population of Ferguson, nor will it allay the outrage of numerous other Americans, regardless of ethnicity, who suspect not only a miscarriage of justice, but, as a lawyer for the aggrieved Brown family said on Tuesday, that “this system is broken.” Meaning not just the system of American jurisprudence, but the very idea of fairness and equality in the nation at large.

Nor are such feelings confined to those who see Brown as the victim. Another whole slice of the nation is convinced that law enforcement itself is under siege, that Wilson was in the position of a scapegoat, that, at worst, he may have overreacted to extreme provocation in the course of doing his duty as a guardian of the peace. There is, after all, a surveillance clip of young Brown apparently bullying a diminutive Asian proprietor as he walks out of his store without paying for a clutch of cigars. Did he then, as Wilson apparently insisted, become threatening and grapple for the officer’s weapon when challenged to get out of the middle of the street?

Was Brown advancing on Wilson at the time he was shot? Or was he backing off with his hands up? The one thing we know is that Wilson shot to kill, and that action can never be undone.

Even had the grand jury process been truly thorough-going — and there is general agreement that it wasn’t — the actual truths of this matter might have remained obscure. They might indeed have been undiscernible. And that may be the real lesson of Ferguson, that there are circumstances that, by their very nature, do not permit complete answers. 

But that does not obviate the need to establish conditions of justice. And, come what may, it cannot be said that justice had a complete chance to prevail in Ferguson, Missouri.