Racist Suspect Prosecutor Who Failed to Charge White Cop who Murdered Michael Brown & Purposefully Undermined Grand Jury Running For Re-Election in Ferguson
/From [HERE] Nearly four years later the local prosecutor — who became a flashpoint when he announced no charges would be filed against the white officer who murdered the unarmed black teenager — is now facing his first election challenger since the shooting on Aug. 9, 2014.
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch, who is white, is facing Ferguson City Councilman Wesley Bell, a black, 43-year-old former prosecutor and judge who was elected to the council a year after Brown was killed. The Democrats are the only formal candidates in the race, meaning the winner of the Aug. 7 primary will run unopposed in November's general election.
Their race brings focus back to Ferguson, a predominantly black community where months of protests over Brown's shooting helped fuel the Black Lives Matter movement. [MORE]
He is a democrat. McCulloch could have directly filed charges against Darren Wilson, the white cop who shot Michael Brown to death, but instead chose to take the case to a grand jury. It is believed that McCulloch did not want the grand jury to indict the white police officer. He selected a mostly white (9 out of 12) grand jury. McCulloch’s prosecutors handling the case took the highly unusual course of dumping all evidence on the jurors and leaving them to make sense of it. McCulloch’s office claimed that this is a way to give more authority to the grand jurors, but it was more like a way to avoid charging Wilson at all — and to use the grand jury as cover for the outrage that ensued. McCulloch's father was a police officer killed in a shootout with a black suspect, and several of his family members are, or were, police officers. He has not prosecuted a single police shooting in 23 years. [MORE] and [MORE].
Under the pretense of working to obtain justice for Black people, McCulloch has purposefully created injustice. This is the ultimate hypocrisy. Although he had the opportunity and the ability to give constructive help to Non-White people he refused to do so. Rather, his speech and conduct directly or indirectly promoted the maintenance and/or refinement of the System of White Supremacy (Racism) in the area of Law and Politics. Even Nancy Grace thought the Ferguson Grand Jury McCulloch created was bullshit.
In January 2015 the NAACP Legal Defense Fund* wrote an open letter to Missouri Judge Maura McShane [also white] asking her to investigate Ferguson prosecutor Bob McCulloch and his team for misconduct in the limp-wristed fake effort grand jury he put together in the Brown case.
The group of experts assembled by the NAACP to review the grand jury transcripts “were struck by the deeply unfair manner in which the proceedings were conducted.” The NAACP cites three areas of particular concern.
1. McCulloch and his team “knowingly presented false witness testimony to the grand jury.” McCulloch admitted this on a radio interview on December 19. The NAACP notes this is likely a violation of the Missouri Rules of Professional Conduct. Specifically, McCulloch allowed a woman to testify as an eyewitness who he knew was not at the scene of the incident and had a history of “racially-charged rants about the incident on the internet.”
2. McCulloch and his team “presented incorrect and misleading statements of law to the grand jury and sanctioned unlawful juror practices.” Specifically, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Kathi Alizadeh distributed copies of a Missouri statute that was contravened by a Supreme Court decision 30 years earlier. When Alizadeh addressed the issue weeks later she said that the statute was “not entirely incorrect or inaccurate” but the grand jury should “disregard” it. At other times, Ms. Alizadeh seems genuinely confused about what legal standards were at issue and shared her confusion with the grand jury, including this remarkable exchange:
Overall the NAACP finds that there are “fundamental questions about the competency of the prosecutors in this case to conduct the proceedings and the fairness of the proceedings overall.”
3. McCulloch and his team “provided favorable treatment to the target of the grand jury proceedings.” McCulloch, at the outset of the case, told the grand jury that the case was “special.” As the case progressed “the questioning of witnesses often appeared to advocate for defendant Wilson’s version of the shooting.” When the prosecutors questioned Wilson they asked him: “[I]f we are sort of done with your questioning, is there anything that we have not asked you that you want us to know or you think it is important for the jurors to consider regarding this incident?”
The NAACP concludes that the entire process “leaves deeply troubling doubts about whether about whether justice was administered in a fair, impartial and competent manner.” The NAACP encourages Judge McShane to consider “remedial action — through a new grand jury, appointment of a new special prosecutor, or other means.” [MORE]
