Liberal mythology about grand juries

Andrew McCarthy:

As Ferguson burned this week, the law books got a workout. Suddenly, grand-jury procedure was all the rage. Commentators better known for parroting the bromide that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich went berserk when the sandwich on offer was a white cop and the grand jury refused to bite.

As it turns out, there was no need to thumb the legal treatises of Blackstone or Joseph Story. If you were going to hit the books, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism would have served you better. Brilliantly illustrating modern liberalism’s roots in 20th-century progressivism — a movement as comfortable marching lockstep with Stalin as it was borrowing copiously from Mussolini — Jonah homes in on the centrality of myth. It is irrelevant whether an idea around which the Left’s avant-garde rouse the rabble is true; the point is the idea’s power to mold consciousness and rally the troops.

For the American Left, a bedrock myth is that white cops kill black kids. It derives from the overarching myth that casts racism as our indelible national sin. As Heather Mac Donald explains, citing exhaustive criminology studies, it flows seamlessly from the quackery that dismisses the disproportionately high incidence of violent crime in African-American communities as an illusion — as the product of police racism and the consequent hyper-targeting of black boys and men, rather than of racial differences in patterns of offending.

Darren Wilson was a white cop and Michael Brown was a black teenager killed in a violent confrontation with Wilson. Therefore, Brown was the victim of a cold-blooded, racially motivated murder, Q.E.D. That is the myth, and it will be served — don’t bother us with the facts.

Once you’ve got that, none of the rest matters. In fact, at the hands of the left-leaning punditocracy, the rest was pure Alinsky: a coopting of language — in this instance, the argot of grand-jury procedure — to reason back to the ordained conclusion that “justice” demanded Wilson’s indictment for murder. And, of course, his ultimate conviction.

I could spend the rest of the day rehearsing why these legal claims are specious. Particularly risible is the story line that the grand jury convened by St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch was a sham — a story line that is itself an elaborate fraud.

Prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich, we were lectured, because the state’s burden in a grand-jury proceeding is so scant. Prosecutors need not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, as they must do at trial; they merely need show probable cause that a crime was committed — and by the person of whom it was alleged — and a trial should therefore be held. There was conflicting testimony about who the aggressor was in the Wilson–Brown confrontation; therefore, the story line goes, there was more than enough cause to indict Wilson and let the ultimate determination of guilt — and you can be sure they mean guilt — be made at a public trial. McCulloch instead used the grand jury to exculpate Wilson, a white (cop) privilege that a black defendant could never dream of obtaining.

To describe this as nonsense is a slander on nonsense. It is freely conceded that the grand-jury inquest into Brown’s killing was more a political than a legal exercise. That, however, was the result of intimidation by the Left’s race-mythology agitators — very much including the president and the attorney general of the United States. It was clearly not aimed at benefitting Wilson.

In a typical case, prosecutors rely on the low probable-cause threshold applicable in grand-jury investigations only for the purpose of limiting how much evidence they need to present. Contrary to another regnant myth, guilt is not in doubt in most criminal cases. Overwhelmingly, they are open-and-shut, often supported by post-arrest confessions. As a result, the grand jury can appear to be a pro forma exercise — a cookie-cutter procedure the Constitution requires before an accused person can be convicted of a crime he not only clearly committed but to which he will almost certainly plead guilty.

On the other hand, when convinced that the subject of an investigation either is innocent or is incapable of being proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, prosecutors do not present the case to the grand jury. That’s because their focus is the trial, not the indictment. If, after preliminary investigation, prosecutors do not assess the evidence as strong enough to convince a trial jury to render a unanimous guilty verdict, they dismiss the case on the basis of their own professional judgment — it never sees the grand-jury room.
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There is more.

This would not have been a controversy had not several alleged witnesses lied about the confrontation.  One of the first lies was that the dead man was shot in the back.  That was clearly disproved by the forensic exam.  Some of the so called witnesses later admitted they never saw the event.  The "hands up" meme also was inconsistent with what many witnesses saw.  But the left had embraced a story that was inconsistent with the facts and they were not willing to let it go.