The other dispiriting element in these trying days is the occasion of police violence upon civilians that stems for the militarizing of the police in the era of the "war" on terror since 9/11. (Why not a "war" on air or a "war" on shadows while we are making "war" on good sense?) Houston-based journalist Mimi Swartz examines the grand jury system that will indict a ham sandwich but refuse to indict a police officer for shooting and killing a civilian in the most extreme abuse of police-power. If this is a (fair & balanced) diagnosis of "shoot first because there will be no consequences," so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
A Trying Time On A Grand Jury
By Mimi Swartz
TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing
After the Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of manslaughter in the shooting death of Philando Castile last month, Michael Harriot reported in The Root that 99 percent of cops who caused the death of a civilian in the last 10 years were never charged with a crime. Even when seemingly damning video evidence existed, grand juries refused to indict.
If you’ve ever sat on a grand jury, this may not be a surprise. The grand jury’s job, according to prosecutors, is simply to decide whether there is reason enough to bring an indictment. Jurors generally agree there is. As the saying goes, most grand juries will indict a ham sandwich.
Unless a law enforcement officer is involved. Then an interesting conflict of interest comes into play, because prosecutors work day in, day out, with cops to bring criminals to justice.
“Police charged with crimes get the ultimate presumption of innocence,” explained Josh Schaffer, a Houston criminal lawyer, who invited me to serve on a grand jury in Harris County in 2013. (Until 2015, grand jurors in Texas were selected by judge-appointed commissioners like Mr. Schaffer; now, as in most states, they are picked at random from the jury pool.)
One reason for this strong presumption is that cops put their lives on the line for the public every day. Just last month, a San Antonio police officer died, and a second was wounded, in a shootout. Although the aggregate number of officers killed in the line of duty is lower than in past years, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund reports 65 killed this year through June, an increase of 30 percent over the same period last year.
The dangers cops face didn’t need to be drummed in to my 11 fellow jurors. People in Harris County are generally very pro law and order.
Though a handpicked group, we were mixed: five women and seven men, five white and seven black or Latino. While mostly middle-aged, we spanned the economic spectrum — from fixed-income retirees to a successful pediatrician. Most, I believe, started out with an intrinsic respect for the police and prosecutors.
Last year, Harris County led the state in the number of police shootings of civilians. Of the more than 200 officer-involved shootings brought before grand juries here between 2012 and 2016, only one was indicted — and that was just for official oppression. No case involving a possible indictment of an officer came before us.
Instead, we were treated to some cool field trips: a demonstration of a canine unit, a simulated shoot/don’t shoot course to test our reflexes, and a tour of the county jail. I was so fascinated that I didn’t at first think of it as an exercise in indoctrination.
We duly became rubber-stamp artists. And I might have continued to indict away on autopilot if it hadn’t been for two fellow jurors: a young black lawyer and a white former judge. As cases came and went, I couldn’t help noticing that their questions seemed to annoy the prosecutors: They were gumming up the works.
But they were raising legitimate issues. Was it right to indict someone for carrying an almost microscopic quantity of marijuana after he had been stopped and arrested for “walking on the street when a sidewalk was provided”?
“It’s used as a tool for an officer to search and detain an individual who has done nothing,” Alphonso Anderson, the lawyer, told me.
When we asked to interview additional witnesses in a complicated child sexual abuse case, we met resistance. At one point, a young prosecutor accused by the former judge of withholding evidence burst into tears.
Why was it seen as troublesome that our jury asked searching questions or sought more time to study thick case files of serious crimes? Maybe it was a coincidence, but after a while, the tough cases seemed to go to other grand juries. Suddenly, shoplifting came up a lot.
“I wondered, by the end of our time, how Walmart ever made a profit,” Murry Cohen, the former judge, said dryly.
Harris County is changing. The election in 2016 of a progressive district attorney, sheriff and police chief raised hopes of better police oversight. The district attorney, Kim Ogg, sees criminal justice reform and public safety as linked. The grand jury recently indicted two law enforcement officers in separate violent incidents involving civilians. Granted, one cop quickly retired and the other was off duty, but the indictments stand in contrast to past practice.
“If people don’t trust the system, they won’t participate,” Ms. Ogg told me.
I hope she can do something about other, more subtle abuses. I still wake up at night thinking about the people I helped to indict, the ones who were rousted for walking on the street instead of the sidewalk. # # #
[Mimi Swartz, an executive editor at Texas Monthly, also is a NYT contributing Op-Ed writer. Swartz received a BA (English) from Hampshire College. She is the co-author (with Sherron Watkins) of Power Failure, The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron (2003).]
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