N.Y. cop not indicted in choke hold death
- Thread starter Locutus
- Start date
Exactly! Which is probably why you rarely if ever see them indicted for it, don't you think?
The system is biased towards the Police, would you say?
How many Officers stood around and did not provide CPR? Approx 4 or so?.
The GJ system in the US is a joke.
2010 stats -Approx 162,000 Federal indictments, 11 no indictments.
Columbia Law Review – Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is a Crime
I. The Problem with Prosecutorial Discretion
Attorney General (and later Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson once commented: “If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows he can choose his defendants.”4 This method results in “[t]he most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”5 Prosecutors could easily fall prey to the temptation of “picking the man, and then searching the law books . . . to pin some offense on him.”6 In short, prosecutors’ discretion to charge—or not to charge—individuals with crimes is a tremendous power, amplified by the large number of laws on the books.
Prosecutors themselves understand just how much discretion they enjoy. As Tim Wu recounted in 2007, a popular game in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York was to name a famous person—Mother Teresa, or John Lennon—and decide how he or she could be prosecuted:
It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape, murder, or other crimes you’d see on Law & Order but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield: Crimes like “false statements” (a felony, up to five years), “obstructing the mails” (five years), or “false pretenses on the high seas” (also five years). The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sentences. The, result, however, was inevitable: “prison time.”7
It’s Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson’s Just Did | FiveThirtyEight
Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them
"As a practical matter, a federal grand jury will almost always return an indictment presented to it by a prosecutor. This is the basis for Judge Sol Wachtler's famous saying that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to 'indict a ham sandwich.'" — Solomon L. Wisenberg, " Federal Grand Jury Crash Course"
I'll counter that with this article which frankly makes a lot of sense to me. And they don't deny those statistics, but they do explain them.
Cops who kill and the limits of self-regulation
There is bias everywhere, in just about every situation. Life, generally speaking, is not overly known for being 'fair'. Sometimes we just have to make the best of things as we can, even when doing so is a very bitter pill to swallow.
I'm not sure of the definition of the term "homicide" in the U.S. but in Canada it just means death caused by another human with or without evil intent.
Do you really think he has the capacity to grasp what you are saying?
also, all the officers present (except the buckaroo) were given immunity for their testimony to the grand jury.
the MSM is insidious in it's trolling.
Frank Serpico on Eric Garner: Cops cry wolf all the time - NY Daily News
Love this guy....if you don't know who he is, get the book Serpico by Peter Maas, or look up the old movie by the same name (a very young Al Pacino played Frank Serpico). Even better, do both.
Love this guy....if you don't know who he is, get the book Serpico by Peter Maas, or look up the old movie by the same name (a very young Al Pacino played Frank Serpico). Even better, do both.
Note how he looks deep into your eyes while...
And as a bonus for a belly laugh over such a great zinger of a line, this.............
Sorry Corduroy, I don't recall my train of thought. It certainly doesn't make sense to me as it appears! I'm wondering if dumb old me didn't connect it to the wrong post.
You were playing the first year philosophy major role. "How do we know what what is?" But there's no longer a need to defend Eric Garner's killer by getting all wishy washy about the hard evidence, we can now talk about cigarette taxes and Michael Bloomberg. What a relief.
When Eric Garner was being strangled to death he said "I can't breathe" and since we all know if you say that then you *can* breathe, he clearly didn't die from an actual inability to breathe. It was a metaphor. What he meant to say was "I can't breathe under all these stifling taxes and hey guys don't you think Bloomberg is a bit of a liberal?"
Well, technically he did with his life. Perhaps the estate can also pay a fine?