The legal system in the United States is set up in such a way as to maintain innocence until proven guilty. It requires a thorough investigation by the police, an arrest warrant signed by a judge, and a trial whose outcome is decided by unanimous consensus by a jury of 12 other people. A grand jury will often hear the police's evidence for a crime before the person is indicted for that crime. This is the step that happened at Ferguson, MO today. The grand jury did their duty to make sure that there was actually sufficient evidence to say that a crime may have taken place before charging Officer Wilson with a crime.
What happened here is, apparently, an anomaly. In 2010, the last year for which data is available, there were only 11 federal cases that were not indicted by a grand jury out of 162,300+ cases that were prosecuted. This is because they did not have sufficient evidence to do so. That is less than 0.007%. There is an old expression that says something to the effect of a competent lawyer should be able to argue for the indictment of a ham sandwich and get it. True, this is for US federal cases and not for Missouri state cases, but if the proportions are roughly the same, then there should be even few times that a grand jury did not indict in Missouri. Which should mean that, if they didn't in this case, there is no good reason to believe that they should.
The only reason this has made national news is that it was a white police officer that shot a black civilian. And an unverified report that made it sound like Officer Wilson killed Michael Brown in cold blood because he's a terrible racist and the whole police department is racist. The key word in that last sentence is "unverified". A news team probably interviewed someone on the street who said that Officer Wilson just shot Mr. Brown, even as he supposedly put up his hands to show he was unarmed. And that version of the story became the truth in the court of public opinion. Even though eyewitness testimony alone is frequently the worst way to argue a case.
You have to give the Ferguson Police Department credit, though. They did their due diligence by investigating the matter in however they manage such incidents. I do not know how that happens, nor do I really care. Really, I'm just commenting on this post on my Facebook news feed, and the ideas that are behind it:
I'm not going to actually comment on the post because these are my friends and there really are much bigger and more important things I could piss them off with and ruin our friendship over. A little bit of context. Both the black and the red in this screenshot study/studied English in college and seem to lean heavily left in a number of social issues. The black is currently in New York City pursuing her chosen career path, and the red is still in school at the same university I go to, the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. I am the blue in this picture.
But what I'm going to say applies to anyone who has not seen the evidence and yet still thinks that they know what happened and that the decision by the grand jury is somehow unjust. You do not have all of the evidence, so you do not actually know what happened. The justice system as we have it and as it is used in Missouri has seen fit not to charge Officer Wilson with a crime. That is what is going to go down in history, and that is what we must say is the truth.
Does this mean that there is never a time when the justice system gets it wrong? No. But what happens when the system does get it wrong and we know about it is that new evidence is discovered that pushes the truth away from what we thought was the truth and towards what it actually is. Will that happen here? Maybe. I don't know for sure. And neither do you, unless you were on that grand jury, were one of the lawyers arguing the case, or were the judge overseeing the case. So shut up about it and let's get on with our lives.
UPDATE: I know I've just made the case that we should let the grand jury do its job and that whatever we say really doesn't matter, but if you must make a comment about this, at least know what Officer Wilson thought. Here's a few key paragraphs from his testimony, as reported in the Wall Street Journal: Key Passages from Police Officer Darren Wilson's Testimony
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