It appears you don't know what a grand jury is or what they do. A grand jury hearing isn't a trial and they don't find people guilty or innocent. That isn't what they do. The purpose of a grand jury is to find probably cause of a crime which is a much lower standard. If the grand jury finds probable cause of a crime, an arrest warrant is issued. The accused is arrested, indicted and tried and his/her innocence is found by either a judge or a jury. And in the Wilson case, the grand jury found no probable cause (i.e. no crime).
And since the grand jury is not a trial, there is no cross examination. However, unlike trials, grand jurors are allowed to directly ask questions of those who come before them. Grand juries don't need lawyers to cross examine witnesses. Jurors can do that themselves. The grand jury is primarily and investigative and accusatory body. It is not a trier of fact as in a criminal trial.
Then perhaps the prosecutor should not have treated it as a trial and he certainly should not have lied to the court and allowed witnesses to commit perjury and not informed the grand jury that witnesses were possibly lying while under oath.
What the prosecutor did and has admitted to doing is actually criminal. Literally criminal.
He could lose his license to practice law at the very least and even face the possibility of prison time for what he has done.
Do you actually understand that by his actions, he has turned the grand jury hearing for Wilson into a farce and by allowing witnesses to perjure themselves in front of the grand jury, it raises too many questions about how influential some of those witnesses were? Such as witness #40, who knowingly perjured herself and committed a federal crime of lying to federal investigators (which is why they discounted her eyewitness account the day before McCulloch put her on the stand and allowed her to lie under oath, even though the FBI had discounted her so called evidence as being fabricated the day before) and whose testimony so directly mirrored that of Wilson's and which they kept referring to as being proof that Wilson was not lying..
What they now need to figure out is whether his allowing witnesses to perjure themselves had any bearing on the decision taken by the grand jury.
And this is without even looking at the fact that the prosecutors deliberately lied and misled the jury about the law for weeks during that hearing.
Do you understand the enormity of what has happened in that hearing and the repercussions it could have? Because they are now going to go back and look over all of his cases with a fine tooth comb, to see if he has done this in any of the other cases he has tried in the past.
And where is your evidence this grand jury was rigged? The grand jury is an investigative body, grand juries don't determine guilt or innocence. They determine if there is probable cause of a crime.
Then this should have been made clear to the grand jury when some of them commented in the hearing that their role was to get to the truth of the matter and to determine if he was innocent or guilty of having shot Brown. They were not corrected. They were flooded with evidence and eye witness testimony over weeks and weeks, when grand jury hearings usually only take a few days. They were not given any instructions. They were provided with incorrect statutes from the start and then confused by the prosecutor about how and which statute actually should apply. They were lied to by eyewitnesses and knowingly so by the prosecutor.
Do you really think this wasn't rigged?
McCulloch's history meant that he should never have taken on the case at all. He was biased going into it. That bias might explain his disastrous decision to allow witnesses to perjure themselves in that hearing. But it does not excuse it.
"A common definition is "a reasonable amount of suspicion, supported by circumstances sufficiently strong to justify a
prudent and cautious person's belief that certain facts are
probably true".
[2] Notable in this definition is a lack of requirement for public position or public authority of the individual making the recognition, allowing for use of the term by citizens and/or the general public.
In the context of warrants, the
Oxford Companion to American Law defines probable cause as "information sufficient to warrant a prudent person's belief that the wanted individual had committed a crime (for an arrest warrant) or that evidence of a crime or contraband would be found in a search (for a search warrant)". "Probable cause" is a stronger standard of evidence than a
reasonable suspicion, but weaker than what is required to secure a
criminal conviction. Even
hearsay can supply probable cause if it is from a reliable source or supported by other evidence, according to the
Aguilar–Spinelli test.
In
Brinegar v. United States, the
U.S. Supreme Court defines probable cause as “where the facts and circumstances within the officers' knowledge, and of which they have reasonably trustworthy information, are sufficient in themselves to warrant a belief by a man of reasonable caution that a crime is being committed.”
[3]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probable_cause
You seem to be doing more than your share of confusing too.
They presented people they knew were perjuring themselves and did nothing to tell the jury that some were lying. And he even admitted that did have an effect on how the grand jury reached its decision. The prosecutors also provided the grand jury with an incorrect statute and then presented all the evidence and eyewitness testimony to them, and they were reviewing it under the incorrect legislation they had been provided with. In the last days, the prosecutor told them it was wrong, provided them with the correct legislation, when a juror asked how this affected everything, they were told it wasn't a law lecture and to not worry about it and then they were given confusing statements about its impact on the facts of the case.. It impacted directly with Wilson having shot Brown.
I cannot believe anyone is defending this.
Regardless of what decision was handed down, even if they had decided to indict, this would still be just as much as a farce.
What we are seeing is a prosecutor who may very well have just ruined his career in doing everything he could, even possibly have broken the law, to get Wilson off and ensure he was not indicted. If he had done the same thing to get him indicted, if his actions were the same to get him indicted, the responses here would have been identical.
There was more than enough to indict. But his lying, misrepresenting facts, allowing witnesses to perjure themselves, misrepresenting statutes and confusing the grand jury meant that they would not indict.
Defend it as much as you want, but you cannot escape the fact that he has admitted that witnesses lied on the stand and that he did nothing to instruct the jury that they were more than likely lying as he is obligated to,
by law. That alone casts doubts on that grand jury hearing, how they reached their decision to not indict and his role in it. And those doubts will follow Wilson and haunt Brown's family for the rest of their lives.