bearkat42
Well-Known Member
Maybe you heard about the Tamir Rice case and wondered: How does a 12-year-old boy with a toy gun on a playground get shot to death on-camera by the police without anyone getting charged? Put another way: How does a small group of government officials make this case disappear without a trial? Here’s how.
The prosecutor pacing in front of the witness was holding a toy gun that looked like a real gun, which was the same kind of toy the boy had been playing with the day he got shot. A rookie Cleveland police officer had fired twice at close range, and one bullet hit the boy just left of his belly button, carved downward through his intestines and a major vein, and embedded in his pelvis an inch to the right of center.
The witness, a retired cop named Roger Clark, thought the gun was a curious prop for a grand jury. The boy was dead, and had been for more than a year. He’d been accused of no crime, ever. Why the toy? There is no need for theatrics in grand-jury proceedings. They are entirely one-sided forums. Prosecutors decide what witnesses to call and what evidence to present. They instruct the grand jurors, ordinary citizens drawn from the same pool as trial jurors, on the law. There is no defense present because the most a grand jury can do is issue an indictment, which means only that there’s enough evidence of a crime that a judge or jury should sort it out. It is a very low threshold, and it is reached as a matter of plodding routine. It also is done entirely in secret. Who was a prop supposed to impress?
The prop was for them. But it was only theater. Because the boy never pointed a gun at a cop. He wasn’t given the chance to even put his hands up.
The prosecutors reminded Clark, and the grand jurors, that the officers had responded to a 911 call about a black male with a gun in a park—an “active shooter,” they said, though no shots had been fired, there was no one nearby to be shot when police arrived, and the black male turned out to be a 12-year-old boy alone in a gazebo. Active shooter. The phrase was used repeatedly, Clark told me. “They had to be brave,” the pacing prosecutor, Matthew Meyer, said. “They were brave that day.” Or maybe they were reckless, which was one of Clark’s conclusions. Maybe if they hadn’t ridden up in a frenzy, the boy wouldn’t be dead. There’s case law about that, Clark started to explain, opinions that can help define whether force was used appropriately.
http://www.gq.com/story/tamir-rice-story
The prosecutor pacing in front of the witness was holding a toy gun that looked like a real gun, which was the same kind of toy the boy had been playing with the day he got shot. A rookie Cleveland police officer had fired twice at close range, and one bullet hit the boy just left of his belly button, carved downward through his intestines and a major vein, and embedded in his pelvis an inch to the right of center.
The witness, a retired cop named Roger Clark, thought the gun was a curious prop for a grand jury. The boy was dead, and had been for more than a year. He’d been accused of no crime, ever. Why the toy? There is no need for theatrics in grand-jury proceedings. They are entirely one-sided forums. Prosecutors decide what witnesses to call and what evidence to present. They instruct the grand jurors, ordinary citizens drawn from the same pool as trial jurors, on the law. There is no defense present because the most a grand jury can do is issue an indictment, which means only that there’s enough evidence of a crime that a judge or jury should sort it out. It is a very low threshold, and it is reached as a matter of plodding routine. It also is done entirely in secret. Who was a prop supposed to impress?
The prop was for them. But it was only theater. Because the boy never pointed a gun at a cop. He wasn’t given the chance to even put his hands up.
The prosecutors reminded Clark, and the grand jurors, that the officers had responded to a 911 call about a black male with a gun in a park—an “active shooter,” they said, though no shots had been fired, there was no one nearby to be shot when police arrived, and the black male turned out to be a 12-year-old boy alone in a gazebo. Active shooter. The phrase was used repeatedly, Clark told me. “They had to be brave,” the pacing prosecutor, Matthew Meyer, said. “They were brave that day.” Or maybe they were reckless, which was one of Clark’s conclusions. Maybe if they hadn’t ridden up in a frenzy, the boy wouldn’t be dead. There’s case law about that, Clark started to explain, opinions that can help define whether force was used appropriately.
http://www.gq.com/story/tamir-rice-story
