The country is reeling with countless protests from coast-to-coast in the wake of the grand jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.
However, as Mother Jones reports, getting away with shooting and killing citizens is “business as usual” for St. Louis law enforcement officers.
Between 2004 and 2014, there have been 14 fatal officer-involved shootings committed by St. Louis County PD officers alone, according to police data collected by David Klinger, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. That does not include fatal shootings by Ferguson police or by officers from various other law enforcement agencies within the county.
Mother Jones goes on to note that according to Klinger, it is not uncommon for officer-involved fatalities to go unreviewed by grand juries as many are “deemed justified by police internal affairs” division or the local district attorney’s office. In all, only 4 cases of St. Louis Country officer-related fatalities have been investigated by grand juries the last 10 years, to include that of Michael Brown, and St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s office is “refusing to provide details to Mother Jones on the three other cases, which it says are closed.” Missouri Lawyers weekly reported in September that McCullough’s record prior to this period was the same with grand juries investigating only 5 officer-related fatalities between 1992 and 2001, none leading to an indictment.
The statistics out of the City of St. Louis “paint a similar picture,” according to the Mother Jones report, with a “total of 39 people were fatally shot by police officers between 2003 and 2012” and only one indictment handed down against a police officer with that officer being acquitted.
To understand how this can happen, Mother Jones spoke with Roger Goldman, an expert on constitutional law and criminal procedure at the St. Louis University School of law. According to Goldman “a long-standing Missouri statute gives police officers wide latitude to shoot to kill.” Mother Jones elaborates, reporting that
The law states they [police officers] are justified in doing so if they “reasonably believe” their target “has committed or attempted to commit a felony” and deadly force is “immediately necessary to effect the arrest.” According to Goldman, the existence of this law—despite a 1985 Supreme Court ruling suggesting it may be unconstitutional—is one reason why “it’s particularly difficult to get grand juries to indict or prosecutors to even take the case to the grand jury in the first place.”
Back to the present, controversy surrounding the Wilson case abounds with David Edwards reporting for Raw Story on Tuesday that “CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin ripped St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch for asking Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson ‘softball”’ questions during the cross examination of his testimony, which she called ‘fanciful and not credible.’”
Discussing the Wilson grand jury with CNN contributor Mark O’Mara, who represented George Zimmerman after he shot Trayvon Martin, Hostin noted that
When a prosecutor has a prospective target, a suspect, a defendant — a prospective defendant — inside of the grand jury, that’s the prosecutor’s chance to cross-examine that person. These prosecutors treated Darren Wilson with such kid gloves.
Their questions were all softballs, he wasn’t challenged, he wasn’t pressed. It was just unbelievable to me the way they treated him in front of that grand jury.
You can watch Hostin discussing the Wilson grand jury, below:
http://youtu.be/XIKyJbFgs3I?t=2m55s
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