It was his actions after he encountered officer Wilson that lead to his death.
Your prof of that is? Oh wait. you only believe it in your heart to be true.
If Wilson intended to randomly take the life of a black teen for whatever sinister racist reasons he had, he did a piss poor job of planning and carrying it out as witnessed by the gunshot holes in his vehicle.
I never said it was some sinister pre-meditated motive on his part. I don't know. It could be. Maybe he just wanted revenge in the heat of the moment. It could also be he panicked or got trigger happy in the moment after he unwisely escalated a situation he shouldn't have. Maybe he was just defending himself. Jeez, to bad we can't have an actual trial determining that like what almost always happens.
A Democrat prosecutor saw it the same way and could have proceeded with charges against Wilson even without an indictment but he didn't which speaks volumes about the credibility of witnesses against Wilson and the lack of evidence that he intentionally set out to gun down the young man.
To play devil's advocate I could just as well point out that it could be as much to do with the prosecutors being imbedded in the system, and not wanting to piss off local departments he has to deal with for the rest of his career there. He doesn't have to deal with the president or our nations AG or reporters or civil rights leaders in that way like he does the local cops and their unions, and the local politicians he's around every day. About the speaking volumes part. I'll get to that.
The D.A. could have folded under political pressure to use his prosecutorial discretion but then he would have had to present it to a judge to move forward and it just wasn't there. Plain and simple.
It's not like there is just pressure from the media or national political forces. Like I said I'm sure he's also under pressure from the departments he has to work with.
I live in reality as I have been practicing law for 27 years. There are probably thousands and thousands of accusations each year but barely a handful turn out to be anything near what is stated in the initial complaint. Even Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have to keep their organizations fully staffed with people just to weed out the bullshit. Jackson better at it than Sharpton obviously as too many bogus claims would hurt their donations and pocketbooks. You hold the belief that there is wide scale and rampant unethical behavior? That's nice. but where is the evidence? Oh I forget, you only believe in your heart that it is true. If everything you feel is happening in fact was, Jackson and Sharpton would be so busy they would have to build an addition at the DOJ to give them a place to lay their heads at night they would be so busy.
Ah the old "ham sandwich" adage. You do realize that you only need but a 2/3 vote to indict don't you? There is no "beyond a reasonable doubt" requirement in grand jury proceedings. The reason for secrecy in grand jury proceedings is that it protects witnesses from possible retaliation. Not some sinister plot to keep info and evidence from the citizenry. In Ferguson, they couldn't even get that and the prosecutor realized that he didn't have evidence to present to a judge to move forward.. Sorry it was not what you wanted but that's how our legal system works. In a nutshell, a grand jury indictment helps but you can proceed without one if you so desire. You are wrong on several points in your post. For one, witnesses are allowed to talk about what they tell a grand jury outside the proceeding but jurors are not. So the information does not remain forever secret as you asserted. The grand jury has only one function, to weigh the evidence presented by the prosecutors and to return or not return an indictment. As for cops and prosecutors working together, of course they do. Law enforcement bring charges and it is up to the prosecutor to reject or accept those charges. We are only talking one phase of the judicial process so prosecutors and law enforcement working together doesn't bother me and it shouldn't bother anyone.
First of all, why is this so much about Jackson and Sharpton or some race thing? It's not like the police are just unethical against minorities. Even if a lot of the issue, even on this thread, revolves around it I haven't personally made it a point in my statements. It's also not like every unethical thing a officer of the law does goes as far as killing somebody when it's not needed. There is a lot of lesser things that also happen. Yeah, for the record I'll admit that most incidents of police misconduct aren't absolutely provable outside of some video evidence (which seems to really not even good enough anymore as sad as that is) or the officer very badly screwing up and not covering their tracks well. Of course even today with ever present technology the vast majority of crimes in general aren't very provable. That's more a testament of how easy it is for people to get away with things than a statement of them not happening. For the record I'm not what most people would consider a minority. Also, for the record I also personally don't like Jackson or Sharpton and think they are poor representatives of any black community or really any group of people at all. As far as my part of this discussion goes they are also irrelevant.
In any case here's where a lot of your argument falls apart. You say that you have been law 27 years, but then you should absolutely know how statistically improbable it is for cases against cops to keep coming up like this and to keep being dismissed by a grand jury if everything was just as impartial and even as all the other grand jury proceedings against normal people are. You trying to pretend otherwise or your lack of addressing the issue is only be so much bs, or your just that shockingly unknowledgeable about your own profession. Lets just go with the former, for your sake, because the latter might even be worse for you. There is no way around it for you, and it's quite a glaring thing your trying to work around to spin in a sadly humorous way. It's not like it's just these two cases. Now pretty much every week we're starting to hear about more cases now that people are paying more attention, and yet it seems to keep happening. Hmmm...lets see either there is some huge coincidental infinitesimally unlikely series of proceeding these cops have gone through where these ones were actually really absolutely truly without a doubt no fooling for sure the cases that coincidently deservingly don't make it out of the grand jury proceeding and this is all a bad inexplicable series of events that only make them look bad, or very greatly unbalanced and unfair things are going on in our system of justice. I don't know about anybody else, but I'm going with an unfair justice system.
About the ham sandwich part, yes it's hyperbole, but like all good hyperbole it's obvious exaggeration based in reality and said to reveal a truth. That truth being that the outcomes of grand juries are almost totally dominated by how the prosecutors running them want the to turn out. Of course you and your "practicing law for 27 years" has to know that. Right...right? See this is the real thing that "speaks volumes". That being the simplest and most logical reason for the those proceedings to go as they did and the ones that are coming out going as they do where the police are investigated are because that's the way the prosecutors WANTED them to come out like just about ever other grand jury in history. That's the stark truth. Now you can say what you want, but for you to somehow not believe that would make me question your competence at your job. You might even want to tell everybody that employees you it, just so they know how shitty your knowledge of the profession you work in is, and have everybody wonder how you lasted that long. Sorry, if that’s harsh, but it’s both fair and true. And yeah, if for some reason you don't think prosecuting offices and police don't have a huge conflict of interest in investigating each other and aren't mutually integrated in a way that can never make them totally objective with each other and that doesn't create a big problem than your even more incompetent yet. I'll give you a break and say you don't actually believe what your trying to get across though...hopefully. When 27 years at a profession starts to collide that hard with common sense a reasonable person could see, it's time to reevaluate things.
After reading this, I wish I hadn't even bothered responding to the other portions of your post. You obviously want "sweeping changes" and a "repair of the whole engine" when only a valve or two need replacing" . You have your mind made up and the events over the past few months however few, show how evil and crooked cops are and how badly white cops want to kill minorities with that itchy finger of theirs. Your evidence of the widespread corruption be damned.
I don't have my mind made up about the events of the past few months. This is a observation about events that have been going in my and everybody else's here entire freaking lives. I've made up my mind about whole lifetimes of observations and observations of others. It isn't just a race thing either. It also isn't about incidents that only count the killing of people. I want fair and ethical treatment for everybody. I also want everybody, you, me, the guy next door, the criminals out there, politicians, and especially the police to be held accountable for their actions. I don't want second class or a privileged class of people under the law. What I don't want is a system where it starts to become more and more impossible to hold officers of the law to account, and where they are essentially above the law they are sworn to protect on a practical level and above the public because it's so difficult to convict them or they are given so much leeway they are assumed the benefit of the doubt to a ridiculous degree no matter what. We are heading in that direction.
Frankly, when it comes people that have to live under what the police do in their communities every day of their lives, I'm more inclined to believe them than somebody like you who has the luxury of only having to view what happens to those people from a distance and be more sympathetic to them. Not that they are guaranteed to be objective by any means, but I'm betting a lot of them have valid issues. At the vary least I'm vary willing to listen to what they have to say and seriously consider their position.