Andrew McCarthy, the former Federal Prosecutor in New York who prosecuted and put behind bars the Blind Sheikh from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Here's an excerpt of his take on the Ferguson Grand Jury announcement. It's worth reading in full:
It is irrelevant whether an idea around which the Left’s avant-garde rouse the rabble is true; the point is the idea’s power to mold consciousness and rally the troops.Isn't it amazing how the left will presume innocence, even after conviction in a jury trial, when a police officer is murdered by a black assailant such as the celebrated Abu Jamal but refuses to accept the not guilty verdict in the Trayvon Martin or no indictment in Ferguson. But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised as McCarthy points out the left just changes their tune to suit their objective. And that objective is NOT justice but mob rule by the left!
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Darren Wilson was a white cop and Michael Brown was a black teenager killed in a violent confrontation with Wilson. Therefore, Brown was the victim of a cold-blooded, racially motivated murder, Q.E.D. That is the myth, and it will be served — don’t bother us with the facts.
Once you’ve got that, none of the rest matters. In fact, at the hands of the left-leaning punditocracy, the rest was pure Alinsky: a coopting of language — in this instance, the argot of grand-jury procedure — to reason back to the ordained conclusion that “justice” demanded Wilson’s indictment for murder. And, of course, his ultimate conviction.
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The critics’ claim that Wilson’s innocence is put in doubt by “conflicting testimony” is legally and factually frivolous. Legally, our system resolves all doubt in favor of the accused — as the Left is apt to remind us when a terrorist is in the dock, this is called the “presumption of innocence.” Factually, the chatter about “conflicting testimony” falsely implies that all testimony is created equal. In reality, accounts given by anti-Wilson witnesses, where not patently fabricated, tended to be discredited by forensic evidence. The forensics, instead, corroborated the exculpatory testimony — much of which came from African-American witnesses, a fact that undermines the myth and therefore goes largely unnoticed. The grand-jury rules are more permissive than those that govern criminal trials, but prosecutors are still ethically barred from asking the grand jury to rely on testimony they believe is false, inaccurate, or unconvincing.
Add to that the facts that Wilson’s own testimony would have powerfully influenced a jury (as a credible defendant’s testimony always does), and that Wilson would have had the benefit of Missouri law, which looks favorably on the use of deadly force by police officers who are endangered in attempting to make an arrest. A jury would have acquitted Wilson in short order — assuming for argument’s sake that the judge had not dismissed the case for lack of evidence before letting it get to jury deliberations.
If the Michael Brown shooting were an ordinary case, a grand jury would never have been asked to consider indicting Officer Wilson. McCulloch, the chief prosecutor, directed his office to present it to the grand jury because it was not an ordinary case — because it was a racially charged case in which Al Sharpton’s notorious “No Justice, No Peace” demagoguery was amplified by the community organizers in the White House and the most politicized Justice Department in American history.
Ordinarily, prosecutors unilaterally decide whether or not to seek an indictment and, in the rare instance when anyone asks why they decided as they did, are restrained by investigative-secrecy protocols from explaining their decision. But McCulloch was understandably unwilling to make a unilateral judgment for which he would have been unable to defend himself from inevitable charges of racism. He thus directed his office to make an exhaustive presentation to the grand jury. It was both a Pontius Pilate–style abdication that made the community, rather than himself, accountable for the charging decision; and a vehicle that, with the court’s blessing, enabled him to disclose the voluminous evidence justifying the decision not to indict.
All very reasonable, but let’s not pretend reason has anything to do with what happened in Ferguson this week. In Liberal Fascism’s focus on myth, Jonah recalls Mussolini’s assertion, “It is faith that moves mountains, not reason. Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd.” The crowd in Ferguson was moved to riot on the article of a false faith that condemns America and its police forces as incorrigibly racist. It is from this condemnation that all purported “reasoning” proceeds.
Such reasoning dictates that our constitutional right not to be indicted in the absence of just cause should be subordinated to the mob’s demand for a public trial. Succeeding in that legerdemain, it next dictates that our constitutional right not to be convicted in the absence of proof beyond a reasonable doubt be subordinated to the mob’s demand for a guilty verdict.
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