ST. LOUIS (KMOX) – After facing criticism for his handling of the Ferguson grand jury investigation, St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch may have his law license threatened.
A group headed by Dr. Christi Griffin with the Ethics Project will meet tonight to determine whether it will file an ethics complaint against McCulloch with the Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, an agency of the Missouri Supreme Court.
Griffin says initial reports from the Ferguson police chief that Darren Wilson did not know that Michael Brown was suspected in an earlier convenience store robbery were changed in testimony before the grand jury, and she believes that represents perjury.
“He is the one that is allowing that perjured testimony to be presented to the grand jury, and that is a direct violation of the Code of Professional Ethics,” she says.
Griffin also contends McCulloch did not give the grand jury proper instructions – another ethics violation.
How in the living hell did witness 40 get to testify to the Grand Jury? The woman was making it up as she went along. I mean it’s bad. Real BAD!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/12/1351303/-Sean-Hannity-s-favorite-witness-for-Darren-Wilson-is-a-self-admitted-bi-polar-racist-w-memory-loss#
Sean Hannity’s favorite witness for Darren Wilson is a self-admitted, bipolar racist w/ memory loss
Excerpt
Witness #40 was interviewed for the first time by FBI for an hour and 38 minutes on October 22—over two months after Mike Brown was killed. In spite of how absolutely ridiculous the testimony is from start to finish, the grand jury listened to audio of the entire interview. The transcript of the interview begins on page 86 here. Feel free to study it for yourself and see just how hard it is to locate even one true statement in the entire testimony.
Mind you, this is the witness most often quoted and relied on by Sean Hannity.
PAGE 88: In an absolutely strange way to begin the interrogation, we see what already appears to be real skepticism from the FBI when the FBI Agent tells witness #40, “If you lie to a federal agent, it is a crime. You are better off not saying a word and just not talking to us if you plan on lying and sitting in here and telling us lies.”
PAGE 94: The FBI begins to destroy this testimony with basic questions. Witness #40 claims to have ended up in the Canfield Apartments after poorly following directions from the local QT. When she gets to them, she says they look like the apartments she actually intended to visit of a friend of hers from high school in the ’80s.
The FBI asks how she knew what they looked like and she said her friend sent her pictures of the apartments, but not the actual address of them for her to visit. Who does this?
PAGE 105: The witness said she pulled over inside of the Canfield Apartments because she’s lost. She stops and smokes a cigarette and ask for directions again and immediately sees Darren Wilson’s SUV pull up on Mike Brown and Dorian Johnson.
The witness then strangely states that she didn’t know Darren Wilson was a police officer, but that she saw the SUV said “Ferguson Police” on it.
PAGE 108: She says Mike Brown lunges into the SUV through the window and is inside of the SUV from his waist up.
PAGE 118: She describes Darren Wilson stumbling out of the SUV and being “wobbly” like he just got hit.
Here, her testimony goes completely to trash. We now know, based on all of the evidence, that Mike Brown died 160 feet, 4 inches away from Darren Wilson’s SUV.
Wilson claims that Mike Brown actually ran even longer than that and that they ended up less than 30 feet away from each other when Mike was killed—meaning that Darren Wilson had to have run at least 130 feet himself.
Witness #40, having not actually witnessed the shooting herself and having only read conservative accounts of the encounter, didn’t know that Darren Wilson chased Mike Brown for over 50 yards away from the SUV. So, on PAGE 119, she claims that Darren Wilson never left the side of the SUV.
PAGE 124: Witness states that Mike Brown gets in a full football stance and begins charging right at Darren Wilson, who, she says, was right next to the SUV.
PAGE 124: In spite of now being at least 170 feet away from Mike Brown, the witness, echoing the caller, Josie, who said Mike Brown was “on something,” says Mike Brown’s face looked like he was “on something.”
PAGE 132: The witness says she got in her car and left as soon as the shooting happened and then locked herself in her house for 2 weeks.
PAGE 134: She says the only person she told about what happened was her ex-husband but he swears he doesn’t remember anything about the conversation because he’s a heavily medicated person.
PAGE 146: The witness says she emailed the so-called friend she thought maybe lived in the Canfield Apartments in Ferguson the same day to tell her she got lost. When asked if they could see the email, she says she “deleted it.”
PAGES 148-152 : Now the witness is in a terrible place in her interrogation. She just can’t explain how she drove off of Canfield Drive from the parking lot she said she was parked in. Mike Brown is dead in the middle of the street on one side. Darren Wilson’s SUV and growing volume of police cars are at the other. The FBI agent basically destroys her entire story here because she says she somehow “zig-zagged” out of Canfield Drive in a way that was physically impossible on that day.
PAGE 154: FBI Agent flat out tells witness #40 that her story of exiting Canfield in her car is impossible.
Grand Juries Should Be Abolished
http://tiny.cc/ai0lqx
The secrecy, lack of oversight, and disregard for the rules of evidence do not serve justice.
Grand juries originated in 12th-century England to prosecute criminals; in the 20th century, England abolished them. Other members of the former British Empire—Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, Ireland, Australia, and Canada—have done the same, but not the United States. As demonstrated in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, today’s state criminal grand juries serve no useful purpose and make a mockery of justice; they should be abolished. There is nothing grand about grand juries.
The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1791, includes a grand jury clause that reads, “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury.” All federal capital crimes and federal crimes punishable by imprisonment for more than one year must therefore be presented to a federal grand jury, unless the accused waives this right. The federal grand jury does not determine whether the accused is guilty; rather, it decides if there is “probable cause” to believe that the accused has committed a crime. By codifying the grand jury in the Fifth Amendment, the framers intended to protect people “against hasty, malicious and oppressive prosecution.” On the state level, things are different.
In state courts, judges preside over probable cause hearings called preliminary examinations. These “prelims” are open to the public, and they are adversarial. Witnesses are questioned and cross-examined by prosecutors and defense attorneys, all of whom must abide by the rules of evidence.
About half of the states have both prelims and criminal grand juries. In these states, it is in the sole discretion of prosecutors whether to hold prelims or to convene grand juries. Unlike prelims, criminal grand jury proceedings are not adversarial. No judges or defense attorneys participate. The rules of evidence do not apply; there are no cross-examinations of witnesses, and there are no objections. How prosecutors explain the law to the jurors and what prosecutors say about the evidence are subject to no oversight. And the proceedings are shrouded in secrecy.
The Pentagon’s Report of Michael Brown’s Autopsy.
http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/heres-dods-report-michael-browns-autopsy
New York attorney general seeks power to investigate police killings of unarmed civilians
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/new-york-attorney-general-seeks-power-to-investigate-police-killings-of-unarmed-civilians/
New York’s attorney general on Monday asked the governor to empower him to investigate all deaths of unarmed civilians at the hands of police in the state, following waves of protests nationwide over police killings.
Saying the public had little confidence in local prosecutors’ ability to investigate police officers with whom they work closely, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman called on Governor Andrew Cuomo to authorize state-led investigations and prosecutions of police.
The move is necessary to address a “crisis of confidence” in the state’s criminal justice system, Schneiderman said in a letter to the governor.
The country has seen weeks of racially charged protests, spreading from Missouri to New York to California following a pair of cases in which grand juries declined to charge white police officers in the deaths of unarmed black male suspects.
This is good. It’s one state and one AG, but every step in the right direction is a forward movement.
https://twitter.com/JamilSmith/status/542117334195138560/photo/1
Just goes to show that even the best athletes in the world are unique individuals. How could anyone think otherwise? LeBron James is a good man.
Supreme Court of Missouri: Disbar Bob McCulloch
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/supreme-court-of-missouri?source=c.tw&r_by=8064892
This petition requests that the Supreme Court of Missouri, which has jurisdiction over this matter, hold hearings to determine whether Bob McColloch is guilty of gross prosecutorial misconduct in his handling of grand jury deliberations in the shooting death of Michael Brown.
“Can’t Breathe in the Wind”
“With a nod to protest folk songs of the civil-rights era, this editorial-cartoon animation responds to the fatal police cases in such places as Ferguson, Mo., Cleveland and New York.”
This is absolutely essentially classic. It must not be lost.
https://twitter.com/MashableNews/status/541990173324898304/photo/1
Unbelievable callousness…Tamir Rice’s mother this morning:
Samaria Rice told ABC News in an exclusive interview that her 14-year-old daughter was tackled by police when she arrived at the scene of the shooting.
“I couldn’t believe they tackled her and put her in handcuffs and in the back of the same police car that was on the grass that the officer got out of and shot her brother so my daughter is sitting there looking at her brother on the ground,” Rice said this morning.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/mother-cleveland-boy-shot-police-shes-convictions/story?id=27440827
One word. Nazis.
Cold ass Nazis!
Ferguson grand jury documents withheld
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/08/ferguson-grand-jury-documents-withheld/20072311/
ST. LOUIS — In spite of St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s promises to make all witness testimony in the Michael Brown shooting case public so he could show the process was fair and impartial, McCulloch’s office now acknowledges that it kept some records secret at the behest of federal authorities who are still investigating the incident.
The acknowledgment came after a review by KSDK-TV found several key documents were missing from the thousands of pages released by McCulloch’s office on Nov. 24, shortly after the prosecutor announced that the grand jury had decided not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for killing the unarmed teen.
McCulloch’s executive assistant, Ed Magee, said the office released everything it still had when the case was closed, but had “turned over and relinquished control” of some FBI’s interviews conducted in connection with the shooting.
Dorian Johnson interview withheld
A team of investigative reporters from around the country reviewed the transcripts released by McCulloch’s office, which included law enforcement interviews with 24 witnesses. Most conspicuous in its absence was the joint federal-county interview with the witness who had been closest to the deadly confrontation, Michael Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson.
https://twitter.com/Wekhevixwaz/status/541669537985601538/photo/1
https://twitter.com/ItsDLeon/status/541738926328020992/photo/1
God @TheTweetOfGod
Follow
#ICantBreathe is trending because justice isn’t.
9:59 PM – 6 Dec 2014
April @ReignOfApril
Follow
Folks acting like @drose wearing an #ICantBreathe shirt is some sort of coded message. Nah. It was loud & clear. You don’t want to hear it.
8:53 AM – 7 Dec 2014
https://twitter.com/devckelly/status/541381997344477184/photo/1
https://twitter.com/heysyd/status/541765308026208257
https://twitter.com/JDSupra/status/541382929067171840
Wow. I didn’t know that!
Still no change!
https://twitter.com/repjohnlewis/status/540558610380906497
St. Louis Rams offensive lineman…
https://twitter.com/MichaelSkolnik/status/541680061972484096
Reggie Bush…
https://twitter.com/MichaelSkolnik/status/541657788582469632
Stay strong Ferguson. Stay rested & fed to keep up your strength. Please help these courageous soldiers for justice w/ donations. See @Nettaaaaaaaa @deray
https://twitter.com/TheAnonMessage/status/541439181038579712
https://twitter.com/TheRoot/status/541638328248848385
Potus says you have to be steady #Ferguson.
Liza, thanks for the hat tip. I’m so loving it.
We Gotta Pray…
YW, SG2. Her voice is so beautiful.
I’ve been playing it all day.