To Indict Or Not To Indict - You Be The Jury

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The state needed 9 of the 12 jurors to agree on an indictment. The US legal system is based on not convicting innocent people.

Even in countries that just use a prosecutor, they're loathe to send it to criminal court unless they're completely sure a crime was committed.

When they play political ball (say, they think an unreliable witness must be listened to because it's probable cause!), it comes back around to them.

LoveNotHate: yes, but this was not a trial jury, and an indictment is not a conviction.

If we allow prosecutors to prosecute people with no evidence, then they can randomly charge people with crimes that they did not commit. Why not charge the whole city with killing Mr. Brown? Maybe 1 out 1000 jury trials would convict one of the random citizens of doing it.

However, that was not what I am saying. What I am saying is, if we require a jury to evaluate the evidence presented in exactly the same way as a trial jury would in order to get an indictment, there is no point having a trial, because we've already had one. I'm really not seeing the difference between a jury for an indictment and a jury for a conviction, otherwise.

That is not correct, at a trial Officer Wilson would hire a bunch of forensic experts and lawyers to argue his defense. We would see all new sorts of evidence presented by these people to back up what Officer Wilson is saying. The witnesses that are lieing would fade away or be charged with perjury.

The grand jury protects people from incompetent or malicious prosecution. It is silly to have a trial if the state cannot even prove a crime happened. In this case, the prosecutor knowing he has flimsy evidence, let the decision be up to the public.

At last ... this thread has gone from emotionalism to empiricism, and is now firmly rooted in strawman arguments on hypothetical situations, where it will languish until Doomsday ... EXCELLENT!

No, I am claiming that, as far as I know, only three people testified that Brown was moving towards the officer at high speed. The rest is a mixture, some say he was running away, some say he was standing still, some say he was walking towards the officer (some clarify that he seemed to be trying to do so in a conciliatory fashion), some say he was kneeling or bent double, some don't really mention it. We should probably separate out the witness who didn't see the actual shooting, for example. The consensus seemed to be that he was facing the officer, neither obeying his commands nor threatening him.

Yes, it was the witness who was 100 feet or yards away (I believe it was yards). I see how you could have misunderstood my phrasing, but in my defence I thought it would be completely obvious to anyone who considered those two possibilities which one I was referring to.

Hmmm... well, I've been following this case since it started... and I'll give my view at the end of this post.

First, I've noticed that the media always picks the most confusing, ambiguous, and potentially controversial cases to broadcast. For example: in the case of Trayvon Martin... there were multiple similar cases around that time that weren't so much as mentioned. There were cases that were clearcut examples of race violence on all ends of the spectrum(i.e. white on black, black on white, asian on black, etc.) The media didn't mention these. Instead they took a case where no one really knew what happened and portrayed it as white on black violence (Zimmerman was actually Hispanic), they left out 70% of the relevant case details which made it even more ambiguous to everyday people and they did so in order to drive controversy and therefore also their ratings. All the media did was increase tensions.
In the Ferguson case, I believe the media has acted similarly and has increased the controversy and the tensions to the point of increasing violence. And I don't think this was a clearcut case.

This case, I believe, was a tragedy rather than a farce. I think the officer used excessive force, but in self defense. I also think that better training would have helped resolve this issue in a better way, at least in reading situations and in deescalating things.

I believe that American police are out of control. I don't think this case highlighted that very well.

I believe that the prosecutor acted poorly by going too far with the charges and should have settled for lesser charges. The officer should have been indicted for something, maybe manslaughter. I know the jury do have special rights (such as Jury Nullification), I'm not sure what all those special rights are and I don't think Juries are told most of what they can do, they tend to be told to simply give a Guilty/Innocent, but they actually can do more than that...

Under the circumstances, I think the Jury acted adequately, but it isn't the best of results.

Ben Franklin misquoted Sir William Blackstone... "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".
But actually the concept does go back at least to Plato.

The Martin-Zimmerman case grabbed the public's attention, something that usually doesn't happen that much with such cases. It was often portrayed as white vs black, but in reality it was far simpler than that -- the two were involved in a mutual fist fight that both were culpable in starting and the one who was losing shot and killed the one who was winning. In any rational case, the one who shot and killed the other would go to prison for years for murder, but in this one, the murderer was found not guilty. It would have been better for the police to break up the fight and throw both participants in jail for the night.

The evidence clearly shows that he was not running away at the time he was hit by the fatal shot. And if he had been running away, he would have had to be the slowest runner in the state considering that he fell only 8 to 10 feet from the officer.

Except that Trayvon was a known user of a certain illegal drug that causes aggressiveness and paranoia, so it is far more probably that Trayvon initiated the conflict and was not going to back down. And... Trayvon was in possession of stolen jewelry, which indicated a history of crime. Neither of these details were mentioned on most news media.

So it's okay to shoot someone if it turns out after the fact that he had likely committed crimes in the past even though the shooter has no knowledge about that? By the way, there was plenty of mention of a couple of items of possibly stolen jewelry at the time. Was the jewelry ever proven to be stolen? (It likely was but I never heard that it was ever confirmed -- just a bunch of speculation.)

As far as drugs, Martin had used marijuana. Most people I know who use marijuana tend to get kind of mellow with its use.

And don't forget that Zimmerman had prescriptions for Adderal and Temazepam which I understand can be quite mood altering.. Since the police in Sanford failed to take a blood test for a toxicological workup that night, we will never know if he was on them at the time.

Ahem, I was talking about Lean, which Martin was a known user of since 2011, and possibly other codeine related drugs.

I'm out.

No.

It'd only be excessive force if Brown was a female or physically disabled male, where it'd be expected for the officer to be able to overpower the suspect.

Otherwise, possible lethal force (no matter the means) is needed to stop a healthy man from wanting to kill you via fisticuffs.