» Entries tagged with "grand jury"
When It Isn’t A Cop
Police officer Darren Wilson wasn’t indicted for shooting Michael Brown. You shouldn’t be surprised, as Rick Horowitz concludes. Scott Greenfield explains the big lie too many people still believe, the idea that the grand jury in the case isn’t just an indictment machine built into a Potemkin Village of due process for just one case so the masses can go on about their lives. Gideon explores the racial aspect, and Jeff Gamso addresses the silliness of one grand jury dog and pony show promoter. Me? I’m just envious. Here in Arizona, the accused has a due process right to a fair and impartial presentation of the evidence before a grand jury. When the state fails to do that, defense counsel can file a motion to remand arguing the state … Read entire article »
Filed under: Arizona Cases, Government Rants, Juries, Police, Prosecutors
99.9996 Percent Of Prosecutors Are Better Than That
I wrote last week about the first of a great series of articles at the Arizona Republic tackling the subject of prosecutorial misconduct. A surprisingly touchy and defensive group, apparently, some of the biggest-name prosecutors in the state shot back with a group response entitled “Hard-working prosecutors don’t deserve this ‘hack job.'” It went on to read, “Attorneys: Let’s set the record straight, in the interest of justice.” As much as the sassy title probably drew an “Aw, snap!” from every prosecutor whose delicate feelings were bruised by the mean old Arizona Republic’s thought-provoking article, the response from prosecutors didn’t really have much going for it after the title. In fact, it lost me in the first paragraph with this ridiculous statement: A prosecutor’s first duty is to justice, … Read entire article »
Filed under: Prosecutors
The Grand Jury
The first rule of grand jury is that you don’t talk about grand jury. Luckily, the first rule doesn’t apply to state grand juries generally, just to specific grand juries. I can’t tell you anything about any of the poor folks currently being judged in their absence by a group of randomly selected residents in secret proceedings led by an agent of the state, but I can at least tell you a little something about the process in general. As you can probably guess from the first rule, grand jury proceedings are held in secret. In Arizona, it’s a crime to disclose the fact that an indictment has been found or filed before the accused person is in custody or has been served with a summons. It’s also a … Read entire article »
Filed under: Courts
The Bigger Problem
There’s something called a “BAT Van” in Texas. “BAT” stands for “Breath Alcohol Testing,” and the purpose of these vans, as you might guess, is to measure whether a driver is impaired try to detect a subject’s mouth alcohol using a potentially unreliable machine made by a largely unregulated and highly secretive company and then roughly correlate that result to a subject’s blood alcohol while largely ignoring the subject’s unique and highly variable metabolism in order to convict him or her not of necessarily being impaired, but of having too much of that thing the state has so imprecisely measured in his or her blood. Those vans are pretty prevalent here in Arizona too, though we’re switching to violent, forcible blood draws in many jurisdictions and don’t have nearly as … Read entire article »
Filed under: DUI
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