Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
As protests against the Ferguson grand jury’ decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, continue across the nation, an ugly and deeply troubling argument is emerging on the left: not indicting Wilson cheated America, and especially Brown’s supporters, out of a public trial.
Those making this argument assert the prosecutor’s job was to present only evidence that supported an indictment, so that Wilson could be put on trial and the facts of his encounter with Brown evaluated in public instead of in the secrecy of a grand jury’s proceedings. They believe the grand jury, hoodwinked by a pro-police prosecutor, usurped the public’s right to a public trial.
Consider that a moment. A grand jury has the right and responsibility not to indict if it believes the evidence does not support a conviction. The leftists clamoring for a trial of Darren Wilson reject that proposition. They want Wilson charged with a crime and put on trial even if the evidence is too flimsy to support a conviction. They want a show trial, because they know that the expense and stress of a trial, even a trial ending in a not guilty verdict, would injure Wilson. They would indict a man for whom evidence to convict was lacking just so they could see him sweat in the courtroom. That’s how they would punish Wilson for killing Brown.
That’s not justice. That’s a betrayal of justice, an attempted lynching.
Those who disagree that Michael Brown’s supporters were cheated out of a show trial will themselves be punished — denounced and figuratively tarred and feathered by the left’s self-appointed Keepers of The Truth and Guardians of Ideological Orthodoxy.
As Ferguson burns, I leave you with Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.