Whats up with grand juries being credulous towards unreliable witnesses?

[Hauldren Collider]

HC wants to live under this delusion that things are like 90% okay in this country in regards to everything. I honestly can't think of one thing he'd change from the status quo in the justice system.

I would get rid of grand juries, for starters. I actually agree they are a bad system.

There is a reason many states no longer have them.

[Hauldren Collider]

Berz alluded to the ham sandwich standard earlier, and that's entirely the case currently in this country:



GJs do what prosecutor's tell them to do, simple as that. If a prosecutor doesn't make an effort to present a case in favor of an indictment, then he simply doesn't want them to indict. This is why the entire concept is fundamentally flawed.

Prosecutors are supposed to give the defendant a fair shake. The fact that they often don't doesn't mean you can criticize a prosecutor for following the ethics rules.

Your argument that unless the jury indicts he isn't doing his job is just plain wrong. If a prosecutor railroads a grand jury, he is committing an ethics violation, plain and simple. Just because you *can* doesn't mean you should. And just because some people do railroad defendants doesn't mean that a prosecutor's heart isn't really in it when he doesn't.

EDIT: To be more specific, the prosecutor is supposed to include exculpatory evidence. In practice many prosecutors do not.

[Ben Kenobi]

HC wants to live under this delusion that things are like 90% okay in this country in regards to everything. I honestly can't think of one thing he'd change from the status quo in the justice system.

I'm not quite sure how that squares with the statement that overwhelming evidence in this case indicates that the system worked.

[Dinner]

Everyone knows eye witness reports are unreliable just look at the contradictory babble of self proclaimed eye witnesses during the Kennedy assassination or during the recent case in Ferguson. Luckily, most grand juries place only secondary importance on eye witness testimony and instead emphasize material evidence. The material evidence was overwelming.

[Boris Godunov]

Prosecutors are supposed to give the defendant a fair shake. The fact that they often don't doesn't mean you can criticize a prosecutor for following the ethics rules.

We're not talking about the prosecutor withholding substantive exculpatory evidence in favor of the defendant, which would be unethical (although not illegal, interestingly enough). Such evidence should move the DA to call for a dismissal outright. We're talking about presenting evidence in such a light as to garner an indictment. Again, GJ proceedings are not trials, and there is no expectation that GJs will review every jot of evidence before deciding to indict. The prosecutor's job is just to show enough probable cause to get an indictment and then move to trial, where a "real" jury gets to do all that.

But in the Wilson matter, you have a DA who never went to the lengths he did with GJs before in terms of the amount of evidence presented and the number of witnesses called (and indiscriminately, apparently). Regardless of the outcome, doesn't it seem more unethical to have different standards of presenting evidence to the GJ based on the defendant? I'd say so.

Your argument that unless the jury indicts he isn't doing his job is just plain wrong.

Where I did make that argument? I've made no statement whatsoever as to whether or not I felt the GJs were right or wrong in their ultimate decisions. What I have said--and which is entirely true--is that in practice DAs can get GJs to do whatever the DA wants, and therefore when a GJ declines to indict someone, it says nothing about the innocence or guilt of the defendant. It just tells us what the DA wanted to happen.

And in that light, GJs are fundamentally flawed entities and there's a good reason why they aren't used in most states. As I said above, I think a panel of people with, you know, actual legal expertise would be a better method of producing indictments.

[regexcellent]

Boris, would you have preferred a different outcome? At a very minimum, we should all be able to agree that the result (not to indict) was correct.

[Boris Godunov]

I've no idea wrt Wilson. Far more material to go through than I have the time and inclination. And it's completely inconsequential if I did or didn't--I'm not a legal expert, and neither are you or most of the people arguing about it. That's why I advocate for panels of legal experts deciding on indictments. I would take their decisions as being more likely to be based on sound legal reasoning than I do the current grand jury scheme in the states where those are used.

I do believe that the officer who killed Garner should have been indicted for reckless endangerment at the very least. The entire confrontation was done with unnecessary aggression by the police that ultimately resulted in a person being killed. This happens all too often where police instigate violent engagements from the get-go.

[Hauldren Collider]

therefore when a GJ declines to indict someone, it says nothing about the innocence or guilt of the defendant. It just tells us what the DA wanted to happen.

This is what I'm saying is wrong. The prosecutor basically always has the ability to get the grand jury to indict, it is true--but not all prosecutors run their grand juries that way. The prosecutor may very well want an indictment yet not get one, if he follows the ethics rules.