Ferguson Prosecutor Couldn't Win

The obvious thing to say about the events in Ferguson, Missouri, is that St. Louis County Chief Prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch wasn't trying that hard to get an indictment. He put all the evidence in front of the grand jury, not simply hand-selected facts that looked bad for police officer Darren Wilson. The old saying goes that a prosecutor can get a ham sandwich indicted, if he really wants to. This is not quite actually true -- grand juries do return no bills from time to time. But it is nearly true, which is good enough for the aphorism factory.

What's less obvious is what we should think about this. One reasonable way of looking at it is to say that grand juries are not equipped to deal with a massive evidence dump, and handing them volumes and volumes of evidence comes with a high risk that they will fail to indict someone who is, in fact, provably guilty of a crime, so the prosecutor was abdicating his job by handing the evidence over to a secret grand jury without the same standards of evidence -- and adversarial zeal -- that we'd see in a regular public trial. Moreover, this was most unfair, because the folks who aren't police officers don't get this kind of treatment. This was the point of view that was most prominent in my Facebook feed this morning.