by digby
Think Progress reports that the NAACP legal defense fund has sent a letter to the Missouri judge overseeing the Grand Jury that declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson asking her to investigate the behavior of Prosecutor Bob McCullough and appoint a special prosecutor to the case:
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.
Click over to the post to read the remarkable exchange in the transcript. Unbelievable.
The NAACP notes that the prosecutors also encourage the grand jury to conduct their own internet research on the case, despite explicit instructions from the judge not to do so.
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.”
In a footnote, the NAACP cites the law — Missouri Statute 56.110 — that gives Judge McShane the power to restart the case against Wilson.
I have wondered about this since the night McCullough gave his rambling speech to the TV cameras. Why was this Grand Jury decision considered the final word --- as if a trial had been conducted and Wilson found not guilty. I'm no expert but it seemed to me that it wasn't just something for the feds to take up as a matter of civil rights violations. The Governor could have appointed a special prosecutor but being the malignant worm he is, he declined. But apparently, this law applies if the prosecutor is shown to have thrown the case (or be in some other way biased) and it certainly looks as though he did.
Anyway, it remains to be seen if anything will come of this. But it certainly appears that the NAACP legal defense fund has a strong basis for asking a judge to take another look at this.
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