Grand Juries Almost Never Fail to Indict, But They Did in Ferguson

The St. Louis County grand jury who came out with a “No True
Bill” on all five potential indictments against Ferguson PD Officer
Darren Wilson did an incredibly rare thing. How rare?
FiveThirtyEight reports:

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.

I’ll do the math for you: that’s 0.0000679 percent of the time.
Yes, these numbers are federal and not state cases, so
they exclude the jurisdiction of St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob
McCulloch. But also note, viaFiveThirtyEight:

“If the prosecutor wants an indictment and doesn’t get
one, something has gone horribly wrong,” said Andrew D. Leipold, a University of Illinois law
professor who has written critically about grand juries.
“It just doesn’t happen.”

McCulloch’s
bizarre, rambling, at times overtly hostile press conference
announcing that there would be no indictment of Officer Wilson in
the shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown gave some the
impression that he was not an objective party in this
investigation. McCulloch’s ties to law enforcement could hardly be
more intimate. As reported by
CBS News:

The Missouri prosecutor overseeing an investigation into
the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael
Brown has deep family roots among police: his father,
mother, brother, uncle and cousin all worked for St. Louis’ police
department, and his father was killed while responding to a call
involving a black suspect.

Grand juries rarely indict law enforcement officials. It’s hard
to imagine they’d ever indict one if the prosecutor’s allegiances
are as evident as McCulloch’s appear to be.

(Hat tip: Andrew
Fishman.)