Tali89 said:
It's not Wilson's fault that the witnesses testifying against him were found to be unreliable by the grand jury proceeding.
What does that sentence have to do with anything?
It's not even a straw man; it's just complete irrelevance.
The question as pertains to calling a known liar to the stand and encouraging her to perjure herself is on Bob McCulloch and his team.
As to the witnesses against Wilson you're complaining about, neither should McCulloch have called them when he knew they had lied.
Now consider these alleged witnesses known to have lied.
Prosecutors challenged those who testified against the officer, questioned them adversarially. They did not do so when people testified on behalf of the officer. Indeed, in the case of "Witness 40", the perjury on behalf of the officer got her invited back for a second session.
So the process goes something like this:
• Should I call a perjuring witness?
―Legal answer, no. Functional answer, why not?
• Is this witness perjuring on behalf of the officer or against him?
―Legal answer, doesn't matter. Functional answer, If testifying on behalf of officer, then no adversarial questioning. If testifying against officer, then discredit.
The question isn't just who was called, but how those people were treated. This is an independent legal question of its own, but also pertains to the question of due process in the context of equal protection; as noted, this was an extraordinary process involving extraordinary protection under the law.
Sometimes the difference seems a matter of directions on a flow chart; for some of us, Justice is an abstraction to be pursued, while for others it is simply whatever process is at hand. The latter is an outcome whereby the institution and processes of the courts themselves stands as a surrogate for justice. And when we add up those perspectives, the general theme that emerges is that everybody seems to know our justice system is awry, but many want to keep it that way for certain things. That is to say, you will hear about the courts as a tool for eminent domain, and how that is unjust; you will hear about how sleazy personal injury attorneys are, or divorce lawyers, or patent troll attorneys, and how those processes are unjust; and, of course, you will hear about our criminal justice system, and how it keeps falling all over itself; the truth is that it's all been trimmed and shaped and optimized to the point of being formally skeletal, and looks as if it could fall over if the winds are strong enough.
It's why we watch judges, for instance. And it's why it matters who is nominated and confirmed to the federal bench. The grand jury process in Ferguson was such a mess that we haven't even gotten to the judge, yet.
But consider politics and justice. In the recent gay marriage slate, what has emerged is that decisions favoring marriage equality are straightforward and generally consistent in their constitutional construction, while the decisions against are nearly incomprehnsible and rely on specifics that would not hold consistently if brought to general application.
Robicheaux, a decision out of a federal court in Louisiana, went after single-parent households in order to justify its rejection of homosexual unions. Later that month, Judge Edward Rubin, in a state court at Lafayette, destroyed Louisiana's ban against same-sex marriage with a
straightforward ruling attending the Constitution↱. The difference between the rulings in
Robicheaux and
Costanza is almost unbelievable; the former is a tantrum registering somewhere in the range of absurdity, the latter is a judicial ruling. (
See also, the quick, nearly hilarious
"clarification" of an injunction↱ from a federal court at Tallahassee; the judge is nearly disbelieving of the question put before him.)
Trying to account for similar differences in the criminal justice system?
The common thread is the idea of what direction a flow chart points. Constitutional principle is
subservient to desire in
Robicheaux, just as it is in any argument trying to call the Ferguson grand jury any respectable manner of due process.
And it does make a difference; the analyst I was following in advance of the
DeBoer decision against marriage equality was right, and I was wrong, insofar as the Sixth went against same-sex marriage, but, strangely, he got the judges
exactly wrong insofar as Sutton and Daughtery switched places compared to the projection.
That notion of what direction the chart flows
matters.
And this is also why we watch prosecutors. Three controversial names:
Elliot Spitzer,
Rudy Giuliani, and
Chris Christie. Even among partisan support there are large factions that measure these individuals by an asshole scale. We might argue over their corruption or awfulness as Democrat or Republican, but how many will
really stop and apply that consideration to their tenures as prosecutors? In other words, they were angels up until the day they stopped being prosecutors and became assholes.
It's kind of the same expectation of good faith we are to show the police. You know, the kind that leads to the mentality that a police officer can lie in good faith. And good faith, as I have noted, is what Bob McCulloch is preparing to stand on.
This is a difficult situation; we are at a point where the question is not simply what happened that day in Ferguson, but also includes our basic definitions of justice and due process. In every way this bad situation could have gotten worse, it has. Procedurally speaking, it will be a few months at least before it has a chance to get any better. This season of our discontent will persist for now. Justice sharpens her sword, if only in hopes of simply holding the line. This cannot keep getting worse; the People are running out of room to retreat.
Both you and Bells are cherry picking. You want to focus all this attention on one insignificant witness and ignore a number of witnesses. That isn't what the grand jury did. The grand jury did what they should have done. They looked at all witnesses and all the evidence before drawing a conclusion.
