The problems with Prosecutor Bob McCulloch

[summer]

news.yahoo.com/how-prosecutor-bob-mcculloch-s-controversial-past-is-making-matters-worse-in-ferguson-212622087.html

When St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch took to the podium late Monday night to announce the grand jury’s decision on the controversial death of Ferguson, Mo., teenager Michael Brown, he didn’t deliver an indictment of Darren Wilson, the local police officer who shot and killed Brown on Aug. 9.



In fact, the only person who was indicted — in the court of public opinion, at least — was McCulloch himself.



“An extended whine and complaint,” said CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. “Entirely inappropriate and embarrassing.”



“A long-winded, smirking speech,” added Gawker.



“Bizarre,” concluded the Daily Mail.



Attorney General Eric Holder, meanwhile, was “particularly angry” at McCulloch for invoking his name and “tak[ing] the focus off the grand jury and put[ing] it squarely on [McCulloch himself],” according to the New York Times. "This process is broken," said Benjamin Crump, a Brown family attorney.



The judgment of McCulloch was remarkably swift — and remarkably harsh. But why?



The answer has as much to do with the way McCulloch has conducted himself as a prosecutor for the last 25 years as with the words he uttered Monday night — and it’s leading critics to say that we should be more careful about who we allow to oversee cases such as Brown’s in the future.



Part of the problem was McCulloch’s monologue, which he delivered at night, when violence is more likely to occur and crowds are harder to control. Viewers in Ferguson and elsewhere were shocked that, before revealing the grand jury’s verdict, McCulloch spent 10 minutes hectoring Twitter for showing interest in Brown’s tragic death. “Within minutes, various accounts of the incident began appearing on social media, accounts filled with speculation and little if any solid, accurate information,” McCulloch said. “Almost immediately, neighbors began gathering and anger began growing because of the various descriptions of what had happened.”



The response from actor Wil Wheaton was typical: “Remember that time social media shot an unarmed teenager, and left his body on the street for four hours? Bob McCulloch remembers.”



But in truth, the problem runs deeper than McCulloch’s rambling remarks. The real problem is that everyone who’s been paying attention to Ferguson over the last few months was primed to distrust him long before Monday night.



For decades McColluch has been viewed suspiciously by many in his own community. They regard him as having a strong prosecutorial bias in favor of law enforcement and an unusually strong prejudice against its accusers.



His family background reinforces this suspicion. McCulloch’s father, brother, nephew and cousin all served with the St. Louis Police Department; his mother was a clerk there. On July 2, 1964, when McCulloch was 12, his father, a 37-year-old canine officer, Paul McCulloch, was shot in the head and killed by a fleeing kidnapper named Eddie Glenn in the former Pruitt-Igoe housing projects. McCulloch never got over his father’s slaying. He resolved to become a police officer himself, but he was forced to rethink his career ambitions after losing a leg to cancer as a teenager. “I couldn’t become a policeman,” McCulloch once told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “So being county prosecutor is the next best thing.” His father’s death was a major theme in his first campaign ads.



McCulloch showed a knack for controversy from the start. Shortly after taking office in 1991, he charged Axl Rose with misdemeanor assault and property damage for allegedly hitting a security guard, hurting three concertgoers and damaging a dressing room at Riverport Amphitheater after a riotous Guns N’ Roses concert ended with injuries to 40 fans and 25 police officers. McCulloch made headlines by pursuing Rose across the country to serve an arrest warrant. “Wherever he goes, we’ll be waiting for him,” McCulloch told the media. “If he wants to cancel his whole schedule, fine. If he leaves the country, we’ll notify Customs to get him when he comes back.”



But it was a pair of later cases that convinced locals McCulloch’s sympathies lay with government and law enforcement officials and not with their alleged victims.



In 1997, an employee of the St. Louis County Economic Council named Russ Signorino contacted the FBI to report what he said was improper behavior by a member of the county executive’s cabinet. He also sent reporters an anonymous fax from a Kinko’s in Creve Coeur, Mo. Claiming that the fax contained a threat, McCulloch gave a grand jury subpoena to the county police, who then used it to obtain security footage from Kinko’s showing that Signorino had sent the message.



The only hitch? McCulloch never told the grand jury what he was doing, and he later admitted that Signorino had never issued a threat or committed a crime. No matter: Signorino was forced to resign anyway. According to the Post-Dispatch, McCulloch denied “that he had abused the grand jury process to identify a whistleblower who was acting lawfully.”

In 2001, McCulloch convened another grand jury after a pair of undercover drug officers shot and killed two men, a suspect and his passenger, outside a Jack in the Box in Berkeley, Mo. The officers told the jurors that they had fired only after the suspect tried to run them over with his car, and in his public statements about the secret proceedings, McCulloch himself repeatedly insisted that “every witness” had corroborated the officers’ version of events.



But a subsequent report by the Post-Dispatch revealed that McCulloch had lied. Only three of the 13 detectives who testified said the suspect's car had moved forward. Two of them were the shooters themselves; the third was "a detective who McCulloch later said he considered charging with perjury because his account was so at odds with the facts." According to the grand jury tapes, “four other detectives testified that they never saw the suspect’s car travel toward the officers.” A collision expert working for the Justice Department also determined that the suspect's car had remained in reverse throughout the incident. But McCulloch never brought any of this evidence before the grand jury — and, as a result, the jurors determined that the officers were right to fear for their safety. The case didn't go to trial.



When activists protested, McCulloch snapped back. “These guys were bums,” he said of the suspects. “The print media and self-anointed activists have been portraying the two gentlemen as folk heroes and have been vilifying the police. I think it is important for the public to know that these two and others like them for years have spread destruction in the community dealing crack cocaine and heroin.”



This summer, African-American leaders called for a special prosecutor to replace McCulloch on the Brown case, citing these controversies as well as McCulloch’s decision to support challenger Steven Senger (a white man) over incumbent Charlie Dooley (a black man) in the 2014 Democratic primary for county executive. “Nobody thinks Michael Brown can get a fair shake from this guy,” Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman, told the New York Times. “There is very little faith, especially in the black community, that there would ever be a fair trial.” Missouri state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed presented a petition with 70,000 signatures calling for McCulloch to recuse himself from the case, but McCulloch refused to back down.



“I have absolutely no intention of walking away from the duties and responsibilities entrusted to me by the people in this community,” he told KTRS in St. Louis. “I have done it for 24 years, and I’ve done, if I do say so myself, a very good job.”



But given the blowback to McCulloch’s remarks on the Brown decision — and the arson, looting and violence that plagued Ferguson overnight — it’s hard not to wonder if the situation in Missouri would be a little safer right now, and the conversation across the United States a little calmer, if someone else had been standing at that podium Monday evening. Someone, perhaps, without McCulloch’s history of identifying so forcefully with the police; someone who wouldn’t have been as tempted to spend the second half of his press conference discrediting witnesses and presenting evidence in Wilson's favor — a move that made McCulloch sound more like a defense attorney than a prosecutor.



Does this mean the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson is wrong? That it reflects the maneuvering of a biased prosecutor rather than a judicious reading of the facts? Not necessarily. But because McCulloch’s motives have long been in doubt, too many people now assume that he's the reason Wilson won't have to stand trial. That’s dangerous — and divisive. In the future, prosecutors such as McCulloch and politicians such as Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon should recognize that perception matters in controversial cases like Ferguson.



It’s great that McCulloch thinks he’s done “a very good job.” But what may be more important, in the end, is whether the rest of America agrees.

[secretlyevil]

If this man had any soul at all he would have stepped aside for a special prosecutor.

[sunny]

Nov 26, 2014 16:15:09 GMT -5 secretlyevil said:

If this man had any soul at all he would have stepped aside for a special prosecutor.

right? only someone who is so insulated, power-hungry, and blindly righteous would WANT to be overseeing this case if there is even a hint of doubt as to your bias. GTFO and let someone else play the part so people believe the grand jury's decision. nope, nope, nope. I actually don't understand the law enough to wonder why a superior wouldn't or couldn't force him to stand aside. I'm sure there's some rule against that, but really! 

[cville]

Ho lee sheet.

I mean, whoa. There's thinking someone is a biased, unprofessional, unethical asshat, and then there's KNOWING.

[WOT?*]

thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/11/26/3597322/justice-scalia-explains-what-was-wrong-with-the-ferguson-grand-jury/

Justice Scalia Explains What Was Wrong With The Ferguson Grand Jury

On 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.

In contrast, McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours before the grand jury and presented them with every scrap of exculpatory evidence available. In his press conference, McCulloch said that the grand jury did not indict because eyewitness testimony that established Wilson was acting in self-defense was contradicted by other exculpatory evidence. What McCulloch didn’t say is that he was under no obligation to present such evidence to the grand jury. The only reason one would present such evidence is to reduce the chances that the grand jury would indict Darren Wilson.

Compare Justice Scalia’s description of the role of the grand jury to what the prosecutors told the Ferguson grand jury before they started their deliberations:

And you must find probable cause to believe that Darren Wilson did not act in lawful self-defense and you must find probable cause to believe that Darren Wilson did not use lawful force in making an arrest. If you find those things, which is kind of like finding a negative, you cannot return an indictment on anything or true bill unless you find both of those things. Because both are complete defenses to any offense and they both have been raised in his, in the evidence.

As Justice Scalia explained the evidence to support these “complete defenses,” including Wilson’s testimony, was only included by McCulloch by ignoring how grand juries historically work.

There were several eyewitness accounts that strongly suggested Wilson did not act in self-defense. McCulloch could have, and his critics say should have, presented that evidence to the grand jury and likely returned an indictment in days, not months. It’s a low bar, which is why virtually all grand juries return indictments.

But McCulloch chose a different path.