This is the tweet from the Guardian article that gives the 99.993% statistic:
The statistic is from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and is based on the year 2010 (from the linked article)
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.
Apparently information on police indictments is very hard to get, but the WSJ says that 41 police officers were charged with either murder or manslaughter in connection with on-duty shootings over a seven-year period ending in 2011. The Houston Chronicle has a longer report on this topic and is the source for the 80/81 statistic:
Charges in police shootings also are rare in other large cities. In Dallas, only one police officer was indicted from 2008 to 2012, after grand juries reviewed 81 shootings involving 175 officers. The most recent Chicago police officer to be charged in an on-duty shooting was in 2007.
Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officersâ Union, said grand jurors empathize with police officers who face life-and-death situations, even if the suspect who is shot does not display a weapon. The low number of indictments against HPD officers, Hunt believes, is because they are well-trained and act only when there is some threat of deadly force.
âI donât think a grand jury is likely to indict someone if they put themselves in that officerâs shoes and they say, âYou know what, I probably would have done the same thing,â â Hunt said.
Iâve heard the argument before that white Americans are more likely to identify with the white police officer rather than the black victim, but itâs interesting to see the same theory given by someone who would want to downplay a bias. The article also mentions a shooting simulator that people on the grand jury use, which is only going to exaggerate this identification with police:
Julian Ramirez, who is head of the DAâs civil rights unit, said the training simulator uses scenarios including school shootings, a domestic violence call, the scene of a sexual assault and traffic stops. Ramirez said the simulator gives grand jurors a better understanding of the âpolice officerâs experience when he goes on some of these calls.â
Itâs worth reading the whole article, which is much more in-depth than the Guardian piece.
The tweet is meaningless because itâs a misleading statistic.
Typically the DA decides if they feel if a crime has been committed and they have a good chance at a conviction. If so the move forward with an indictment. To lose an indictment would be a big deal since it demonstrates you were completely out of touch with the strength of your case.
In the Brown shooting the DA almost certainly thought there wasnât a murder case. There was a lot of evidence that Brown had fought with Wilson in the car, afterwards as a cop Wilson had grounds to engage and pursue Brown, and even if one could show that Brown was surrendering it probably doesnât matter because the existence of differing witness accounts suggests Wilson could have been in reasonable fear that Brown was attacking.
So as the DA you have three options. 1) Donât indict and endure a ton of criticism, 2) indict with a slanted subset of evidence then go on to lose a trial you donât even believe in, or 3) give into public pressure and indict, but assuage your conscience by giving an honest overview of the evidence to the Grand Jury. Iâm not surprised the DA took option 3.
Not only is there political pressure leading to weak indictments but some states have laws where any police shooting goes to Grand Jury, a place where any good shooting should rightly fail to go to trial.
Bias among DAâs is definitely a problem with police prosecutions and thereâs ways to deal with that, but the indictment statistics arenât evidence of that because theyâre comparing two very different populations.
I will say Iâm a bit more surprised by the Garner case, I thought theyâd have a pretty strong case for manslaughter and I wonder if thatâs one of the cases where DA bias led to them leaving the right charge off the indictment.
We could do it for non-Federal cases, there is that pesky Fifth AmendmentâŚ
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger;
Right, abolishing it outright I see now isnât the best approach. Reform certainly would help though. It just seems like a process easy to abuse by prosecutors that have a stake in either outcome. They pick the evidence, witnesses, they get the case they want and present it to the jurors with an obvious bias in how they want so that they get the the indictment or donât. In some cases even illegally obtained evidence is immersible because of the secretive process of the grand jury.
This all makes sense, except there is no evidence that Iâm aware of that the grand jury got an honest overview. Iâm not saying that they didnât, I just wouldnât make that assumption.
Well, one could characterize #3 as âgive in to public pressure to indict, but intentionally throw the grand jury so you can wash your hands of the matter.â Brown and Garner are indeed very different cases in that the evidence in the Garner case was as clear as day.
In the case of Brown I could believe that the prosecutor honestly didnât believe he had enough evidence to go to trial (I see this as part of a broken system where cops are able to kill black men with impunity and the prosecutor as willingly participating in that system, but I still concede that from an individual rather than a system perspective the prosecutor may have been acting in âgood conscienceâ with a side of cowardice). In the case of Garner itâs just atrocious, and pretty hard to believe that the prosecutor didnât just throw the grand jury on purpose in an attempt to make it go away.
And apparently the federal government agrees as they have already announced their own investigation. Honestly, I think that cop will be charged and will go to trial, and that the whole DAâs office are behaving like morons - racist, pro-police-brutality morons.
I guess the issue that stands out for me is that if the prosecutor can basically show the grand jury whatever evidence they want and exclude whatever evidence they want and sometimes use evidence that wonât even be usable at trial, then what purpose in the grand jury serving. Would the Fifth Amendment be satisfied if we put a sticker that said âGrand Juryâ on a machine that printed out little cards that said âINDICTâ on them?
Right now it sounds a lot like, in a lot of places, the Fifth Amendment is already being violated. Iâd like to see that case come forward.
I donât understand why, in these cases they wouldnât just flip the lawyers. You use government lawyers to defend the government against lawsuits brought by private citizens, right? So why not use the lawyers who work for the state defend the cops, and let the lawyers of the citizens act as prosecutors? Police are the state, it is the state that is punished when they are punished, so the state should be in the defensive position, not the prosecutorialâŚ
Yeah, I agree it should be on the stateâs bill to do this, but the conflict of interest seems to outweigh that benefit. Plus, someoneâs going to have to pay on both sides (in the case of a trialâŚ) every time anyway. In the medium term, at least, the ACLU and the NAACP would probably be more than happy to help foot the bill for excellent private prosecutors in these cases. To me itâs just a matter of who the victims are paying, the prosecution or the defense, in this case, letâs get all the incentives on the correct sides.
[quote=âHMSGoose, post:30, topic:47528â]
I donât understand why, in these cases they wouldnât just flip the lawyers. You use government lawyers to defend the government against lawsuits brought by private citizens, right? So why not use the lawyers who work for the state defend the cops, and let the lawyers of the citizens act as prosecutors?[/quote]
Because prosecutor and defence attorney are different jobs requiring different skill sets and motivations.
Putting inexperienced and ill-suited lawyers on either side of a high profile and politically charged case is the definition of a fiasco.
