I'm not sure what you mean by "how much evidence." If you mean what's the standard (like "reasonable suspicion," "preponderance of the evidence," or "beyond a reasonable doubt"), it's probable cause. However, "might a crime have been committed" is the definition of probable cause, so if that's your question then I'm giving you a circular answer. Maybe the answer to your question is just, however much evidence each individual juror needs to feel that a crime might have been committed?AllThingsKC wrote:Forgive me if you have already mentioned this as I haven't read every single word in this thread. But how much evidence is needed for a grand jury to decide if a crime could have been committed? I ask because on the surface, I look at how much attention was put on this investigation from the president down to the police chief. It seems like that kind of attention would provide the grand jury with significant evidence either way. If that is true, then either 1) they didn't have enough evidence or 2) they DID had enough evidence not to indict. Or 3) maybe the grand jury was just corrupt and didn't care about the evidence at all.phuqueue wrote: Do you know what "might" means? The grand jury doesn't determine whether a crime was committed, it determines whether it's possible that a crime could have been committed. "Might a crime have been committed here" is, indeed, a yes or no question. But answering "yes" doesn't mean that a crime was definitely committed because that's not what "might" means at all.
In short, I guess what I am asking is how much evidence is needed for a grand jury to determine if it was possible that a crime was committed.
I'm not challenging your opinion. I have no counter-argument to make. I really am just asking the question.
I don't think the grand jury itself was corrupt. The issue is that grand jurors, like regular jurors, are not trained legal professionals. They're laypeople. They're led by the prosecutor and will typically do what he leads them to do. And it's not necessarily as simple as "McCulloch told them not to vote for indictment." Grand juries hear a bunch of cases and this one was highly irregular, while the rest of the cases this grand jury heard presumably were not. So you're a grand juror and you've heard thirty other cases in which McCulloch came to you, asked for a specific charge, gave you the evidence most helpful to his case, and called it a day. Then you come in for this case and it lasts months and McCulloch doesn't ask for a charge and he gives you testimony he knows is unreliable and he lets the defendant testify and he gives you the wrong law and "corrects" it at the very last minute, and what are you going to do? It's actually funny that akp keeps harping on how "confused" a jury would have been at trial, since confusing the grand jury seems to be exactly what the prosecutor's office set out to do here.
See above re: McCulloch leading the grand jury not to indict. As for whether or not it would be even harder to get a conviction, I think that's impossible to say. We can't look at the grand jury proceedings and just say "well, they wouldn't even indict, so clearly he never could have been convicted," in light of how bizarre the grand jury proceedings were. Regardless of what intentions you ascribe to McCulloch -- maybe, for whatever reason, you don't believe he had any nefarious motivations here, okay -- the fact remains that the way this particular grand jury process went was objectively tipped in Wilson's favor far more than a typical grand jury for a typical defendant. It's like fighting somebody with your hands tied behind your back, and taking your loss to mean you couldn't have beaten a tougher opponent if you had use of your hands -- maybe true, maybe not, but the loss you actually experienced isn't meaningful evidence either way.aknowledgeableperson wrote:Sorry about the wording. I know a grand jury doesn't have to be unanimous. My point was basically that if the prosecutor was leading the jury not to indict (as some as said) then one or more of them could have said "No, we will indict." A criminal jury trial does have to be unanimous so let's say 4 voted not to indict then that means to me that there would have been an even harder time to get a conviction.
A jury trial would have accomplished something just by occurring at all -- it would have subjected Darren Wilson to our actual criminal justice system. Even if an acquittal wouldn't make the situation any better than it actually was, it's hard to see how it could have been worse.True, but for those demanding "Justice for Michael Brown" anything short of a conviction would have been no different than what the grand jury did. True, for you (and others) a jury trial was needed. I on the other hand feel that a jury trial would have accomplished nothing, and maybe even make the situation worse.
mean explains this well too in terms of probability vs. possibility, but here's an alternate explanation from a different angle. A grand jury can determine that a crime wasn't committed, just not that a crime was committed. "Might a crime have been committed" is a yes or no question -- yes, a crime might have been committed, or no, a crime wasn't committed. The problem in this case is that shooting somebody is a crime unless a defense, like self-defense or law enforcement officer's use of force, applies. But defenses are not meant to be presented to grand juries because the applicability of the defense is a matter of law (to be decided by a judge), based on the surrounding facts of the case (to be sorted out by a jury). Clearly the grand jury decided that a crime wasn't committed, but that's because a lot more was presented to them than was supposed to be, and in making their decision based on all that extra stuff, they overstepped their bounds. If this sounds like a violation of arbitrarily drawn legal procedures, it's not, for reasons I already explained in a previous post (which also goes to your next post about grand juries engaging in jury nullification).You used the word might so I just followed your usage. Ok, so is it "probable" that a crime was committed? Now, the choice the grand jury made was not to indict. Correct me if I am wrong but that could be for one of two reasons. First, Wilson did not shoot Brown. Or two, Wilson do shoot Brown but it was not a crime. We already know Wilson did shoot Brown, he admits it so that leads to reason two, a crime was not committed by Wilson shooting Brown. Maybe there is a third or fourth reason for the grand jury not to indict but these two are the most obvious.
True, it seems you feel that maybe the grand jury shouldn't be determining whether or not Wilson committed a crime but if the grand jury doesn't have that power then why have a grand jury in the first place? If the bar is set so low that all a grand jury does is say "yes, the act was remotely a possible crime" and "this person may remotely be possibly the one who committed the crime" then why have grand jury proceedings in the first place?
As for your final question -- the entire common law world except America has already abolished the grand jury, and in half of states it's no longer used even though it technically still exists. So, indeed, why have grand jury proceedings in the first place?
This is definitely true, and in those cases, the prosecutor would not have sought an indictment in the first place.mean wrote:Sure, there are situations I can imagine where someone gets shot and it is so abundantly obvious that the shooter had no choice that an indictment / trial isn't really necessary, but this isn't that case, regardless of the fact that Wilson probably wouldn't have been convicted.
The officers were, evidently, killed before they even knew what was happening, so they probably weren't exercising any level of caution. Of course cops have a right to defend themselves and I've never argued otherwise -- I've only argued that their right to self-defense should extend only as far as it can without compromising the safety of the public. Blaming this on BdB, Obama, the protesters, or basically anybody else is absurd and obscene. And I've got to run now but if you really want to make a thing of it I'm happy to elaborate more later.beautyfromashes wrote:Two NYPD officers killed by a protester over the weekend. I wonder if the police were exercising a 'higher level of caution'. And why are we not requesting the same level of caution from our civic leaders and elected officials.phuqueue wrote:To be 100% clear, I don't want anybody to be killed, ever, under any circumstances, but if a few more police officers are killed in the line of duty because they exercised a higher level of caution before employing deadly force, and this higher level of caution saves the lives of people like Tamir Rice, that seems like a worthwhile trade off to me. Police officers willingly go into what they know is a dangerous line of work.