by digby
I have a piece over at Salon about a famous white conservative activist taking advantage of another famous case of white cops shooting unarmed black men:
They never got to trial. A judge found that the prosecutors had engaged in misconduct by giving wrong instructions to the grand jury and divulging grand jury testimony to a witness, and the indictments were dismissed. But the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice had been simultaneously investigating. They got guilty pleas from a number of the police officers involved in the coverup and they tried and convicted the officers involved in the shooting of civil rights violations.
So, you had a situation where the locals in both the police department and the district attorney’s office were corrupt and/or inept and basically allowed police to get away with murder. Unfortunately, the Department of Justice turned out to be little better. In 2013, the federal convictions were also overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct. The judge vacating the verdict said that the federal prosecutors had engaged in extensive, “highly unusual” and “truly bizarre actions,” including leaks and posting on Internet forums urging witnesses to plead guilty.
We ended up in this case with the police lying and covering up the facts in their shooting of unarmed black citizens and prosecutors at both the local and the federal level apparently engaging in misconduct in trying the cases. There’s a lesson in that somewhere but it isn’t a good one. Even in a situation where it’s quite clear that the cops went over the line and became trigger-happy criminals, it’s nearly impossible for them to be held accountable. You have to wonder what it would take to convict them?
Sadly, I’m afraid we are about to see tragedy turned to farce before our eyes.
Read on ...
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