The Green Valley News has published a collection of Letters to the Editor in which old white people “whitesplain” why the use of law enforcement deadly force against an unarmed Black “thug” like Michael Brown is justified, insist that race was not a factor, and that justice prevailed in the grand jury process in Ferguson, Missouri.
These self-assured old white people — whom I suspect are regular members of FAUX Nation — fundamentally misunderstand the role of a grand jury, and sure as hell have no idea what it is like to be a person of color in America even today, 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Conservative icon and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explains to these old white people why they are full-o’-crap. Justice Scalia Explains What Was Wrong With The Ferguson Grand Jury:
[Last] Monday, Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced that a grand jury had decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown. But that decision was the result of a process that turned the purpose of a grand jury on its head.
Justice Antonin Scalia, in the 1992 Supreme Court case of United States v. Williams, explained what the role of a grand jury has been for hundreds of years.
It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.
This passage was first highlighted by attorney Ian Samuel, a former clerk to Justice Scalia.
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