For years I have written about the slow transformation of America into a police state. While the transformation is probably the inevitable outcome of a failure of democracy, the inevitability was accelerated after Sept. 11, 2001. The case of Tamir Rice reveals the full extent of the transformation and shows how far we have traveled down this deeply disturbing road.
As noted in the hour long dramatic presentation by Cleveland prosecutors, the Grand Jury failed to indict either office involved in the fatal shooting. You can find a detailed description at this site.
The Grand Jury process involved a city or county prosecutor leading an inquiry into whether there is enough evidence to justify charging a person with a particular crime. There is no defense portion to this process. The person "of interest" is not allowed to present any evidence on their behalf. In that sense, a Grand Jury is a bit of a witch hunt in which a prosecutor can introduce any evidence and withhold any evidence they choose. In fact it is so easy to get an indictment from a Grand Jury, it gave rise to one of those humorous, if sad, sayings that "a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich." This hints at the rather unhealthy relationship that exists between prosecutors and a Grand Juries. Through winks and nods prosecutors gets indictments they want and fail to get the ones they don't want. This helps ensure that their win/loss record remains politically acceptable.
In the case of Tamir Rice, the two officers were the ones being considered by the Grand Jury for charges associated with the child's death. If ever there appeared to be a "ham sandwich" just waiting to be indicted it would have been these two officers. The video shown to the public, was more than damning enough to get an indictment. You have two officers racing into the scene, not unlike Starsky and Hutch, almost hitting Tamir with their patrol car. Two seconds later, Tamir was dead. That was the one and only item that needed to be shown to the Grand Jury. With a wink or a nod, an indictment would have been handed down. The Grand Jury would have done what Grand Juries do, they would have indicted the two officers.
Keep in mind that an indictment is not a finding of guilt. It simply says that there is evidence for the matter to go to trail where both the prosecutor and the defense can be heard and a jury then makes the final determination. More or less, what we think of when someone says the name Perry Mason.
Oddly, or perhaps not, in this case, as presented at a press conference by the prosecution on Dec. 28, 2015, the prosecutors office produced an exhaustive hour long defense of the two officers. In fact, if they had not stated that they were the prosecutors, a casual witness would have been justified in assuming that they were the defense attorneys hired by the two officers.
No stone was left unturned in finding and presenting evidence to exonerate the officers. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, I'm saying that this is something that is very, rarely done and only seems to be done with the police are accused of crimes. The final result was a Grand Jury trail that would never be afforded to average citizens. It was a special Grand Jury process that was turned on its head to avoid a trail in the criminal courts, while at the same time offering only uncontested evidence to explain the lack of an indictment. In this case the prosecutor went beyond what was considered the Grand Jury farce in Ferguson, where the prosecutor announced that he had simply presented all evidence to the Grand Jury, instead of just the evidence against Officer Wilson. In Cleveland, the prosecution acted as the defense and presented only exonerating evidence. It appears that every piece of evidence offered to the Grand Jury was accompanied by a lengthy explanation as to way it supported the innocence of the officers.
The Cleveland Grand Jury was a kangaroo court, or more precisely a kangaroo Grand Jury. It is an essential step in the progression towards a police state. The police must have immunity from the law. Without immunity, there can be no guarantee that the police will be willing to enforce the increasingly draconian rules that govern society.
The first and greatest hurdle to a police state has been successfully overcome. The police, the courts and the prisons have become a single entity (the police/judicial/prison-industrial complex) and oversight by citizens is effectively gone. The police can now act without constraints and with almost complete impunity, because the systems intended to limit police abuses have been removed.
It may already be too late, but Law and Order, does not mean what you think it does.
