California senators approve ban on grand jury investigations into police deaths

[FreakinDJ]

Source: Alexei Koseff - [email protected]

Grand juries would be prohibited from investigating police shootings and cases where an individual dies from excessive force during an arrest under a bill passed Thursday by the California state Senate.

Protests sprouted up nationwide last fall after grand juries in Missouri and New York declined to indict white police officers who had killed unarmed black men during confrontations. The system, in which a jury of citizens weighs the evidence to decide whether to bring charges, came under fire for its secrecy.

Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, who introduced Senate Bill 227, argued that the lack of transparency and oversight in grand jury deliberations, which do not involve judges, defense attorneys or cross-examination of witnesses, did not serve the public.

“The use of the criminal grand jury has fostered an atmosphere of suspicion that threatens to compromise the nature of our justice system,” she said.




Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article20444133.html

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Scratching my head. Is this a good thing, then?

Does it mean that police will be publicly investigated, or does it mean that they won't be investigated at all?

[FreakinDJ]

2. A VERY Bad thing

Most if not ALL the District Attorneys in this state are affiliated one way or another with the local police debt.

Take the case of Andy Lopez - the 13 yr old boy shot and killed for carrying a toy gun. The District Attorney in that case was married to one of the Sonoma County Sheriffs

[DLnyc]

26. Not only affiliated, they are joined at the hip.

I agree with what you say, but I would say the problem goes deeper.

DA's rely on the police to investigate crimes and make arrests. Police rely on the DA's to cooperate with them in prosecuting cases.

Police misconduct needs to be processed by independent prosecutors, not beholden to either the DA or to the police.

Grand juries (speaking as one who has served on one) are one hundred percent controlled by the DA. The problem in these police misconduct cases is that DA's are involved. Whether or not they go through a grand jury is irrelevant.

IMHO

[-none]

4. They just took away a tool to investigate suspected wrong doing.

Police can hide behind this. I wonder if the people behind this are/will be pushing that because only the police can fully understand the situation, only police Internal Affairs investigations of police wrong doing will be allowed.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

6. So it means less investigation, not public investigations. ugh. nt

[-none]

7. Yep.

This sounds more like some Red space, like Texas, Oklahoma or Kansas, than California though.

[FreakinDJ]

9. Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles

Los Angeles - Home of the "Waste-Band" shooting

Their trying to cut the cost of paying out Huge Civil Penalties for unjustified shootings is my only quess

[-none]

11. Instead of dealing with the cause, they are throwing away some of the tools used to find and

fix the problem?

[jwirr]

12. Police are already hiding behind the grand juries. Only recently have any police cases been indicted

because of murder and one of those was indicted without a grand jury. The problem with a grand jury is that there is not cross examination of the witnesses. In Ferguson MO the officer was allowed to present his own defense without cross examination. Also the prosecutor knowingly allowed witnesses that were not creditable - like the mentally ill woman who was not even a witness. Many states have gotten rid of the grand jury system.

[jwirr]

10. When we were watching the Ferguson MO jury aquit many of us talked about this. The grand jury

system is a holdover from English law and is flawed. I cannot remember exactly how. But many states no longer use it and neither does England. But some still do.

I think what happens is that the states that do not use it anymore automatically us a regular jury system to determine these cases.

As to rather it is better. The consensus was that it is better to abandon the grand jury system. But I am not the expert.

[jeff47]

18. It's a mixed thing.

On the bad side, a grand jury theoretically lets run-of-the-mill people investigate police actions and thus hold them accountable and this eliminates that check.

In practice, that check doesn't happen. The DA has almost complete control over the grand jury - the DA controls who testifies, and the DA answers any questions about the details of the laws involved. And there's no penalty for answering those questions wrong or putting a "spin" on the answer.

Also, grand jury proceedings are secret. So no one but the grand jurors know what went on.

On the good side, a DA/judicial investigation is public. The DA has to show their evidence to a judge, and thus the public, in order to get an indictment. So everyone will see the evidence when a DA seeks an indictment.

But the DA does not have to seek an indictment.

Overall, it's probably better to conduct these investigations in public instead of in secret. But to really fix the problem, something has to be done to handle a DA's conflict of interest when investigating the police.

[Helen Borg]

3. More transparency would be good.

[littlewolf]

5. this happened in CA ? WTH ...

I was under the impression that Grand Juries only made a determination
if there was enough evidence to go to trial ...
according to this http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Grand+Jury

A panel of citizens that is convened by a court to decide whether it is appropriate for the government to indict (proceed with a prosecution against) someone suspected of a crime.
An American institution since the colonial days, the grand jury has long played an important role in Criminal Law. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says that a person suspected of a federal crime cannot be tried until a grand jury has determined that there is enough reason to charge the person. Review by a grand jury is meant to protect suspects from inappropriate prosecution by the government, since grand jurors are drawn from the general population.

so I guess they are not going to prosecute the police ...

more at the link ...

[jwirr]

14. Instead of the grand jury the will be indicted if there is probable cause. Like has happened in

Baltimore. They investigate police cases just like they investigate any other crime. If the prosecutor finds reasonable cause then it goes to trial just like any other crime.

[Trillo]

19. Riots happened in Baltimore, thus it was something of an aberration,

forcing unusual attention on the circumstances.

[jwirr]

20. But the point is they did it without a grand jury.

[Trillo]

22. And my point was would they do it without riots?

Prosecuting cops who kill unjustifiably is so very rare.

[jwirr]

23. I do not know what Maryland laws require but the states that have abandoned the grand jury

system use probable cause as the reason to indict. Just like in any other crime. The police are treated as citizens who may have broken a law and if there is probable cause then they go straight to a trail just like other citizens. A real trial with a jury, a judge, both sides of the case presented and cross examination. That is not how a grand jury works.

IMO the grand jury system is the reason so few get indicted. The article talks about why they are going to end grand juries in CA.

[LiberalFighter]

8. Do they have a process that requires the prosecuting attorney to investigate

and prosecute? How does one investigate or prosecute if there is a conflict of interest?

Should anyone in the prosecutor's office be related to a police officer?

[christx30]

17. They need an independent prosecutor.

Someone as hostile to the police and ready to investigate them with a lubed up rubber glove, just like a regular person.

[Calista241]

13. The grand jury, in Ferguson, was used by the DA to present a "case" that the DA

Knew would not result in charges. He essentially rigged the system in favor of the outcome he wanted.

I imagine the Ca law was proposed to prevent this, but without it being replaced by a new, objective, and more transparent system, I don't see how this is supposed to work.

[malthaussen]

15. So, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

If Grand Juries are incompetent to judge police-involved crimes, then they must be incompetent to judge all crimes, n'est-ce pas? So the California State Senate must be in favor of discontinuing the Grand Jury system. Surely, they wouldn't want one part of society to receive special treatment, would they?

-- Mal

[Baitball Blogger]

16. Checks and balances be damned!

[candelista]

21. The grand jury system should be abolished entirely.

Grand juries have been shown to be rubber stamps for prosecutors. As the saying goes, a DA can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. The Brits abolished their grand jury system years ago for exactly this reason. They think our system is "quaint."

[Comrade Grumpy]

24. The sponsor, Holly Williams, is black progressive Democrat.

She sees grand juries as places where prosecutors can make police violence cases go away.

[Joe Chi Minh]

25. Slightly tangential, but here is an interesting article

that Marilyn Mosby and Hillary might benefit from reading. It concerns the way in which the perjured media build people up.... to knock them down - specifically here, the afore-mentioned being encouraged by the media to court excessively high expectations.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/theanchoress/2015/05/06/will-media-infatuation-doom-marilyn-mosby/