Mr Schraub has some silly things to say on the topic, some remarks on that include (below the fold ’cause it’s long):

  1. He starts by suggesting gnostic secrets held only by lawyers are at play here, that those without law degrees should not comment on legal decisions.  But he only says this to contradict it. But what is unstated is why lay-legal people (non-lawyers) they don’t have points (when pointing at actual lawyers remarks contra, say the cited ACA) is unstated.
  2. Then he cites bad statistics and manages to forget the obvious conclusion. Apparently he cites a “538” post on grand jury non-indictments, which is alas self-contradictory. In the US apparently 162k grand juries (! (at what cost?)) cases failed to indicted only 11  times. Yet in just Dallas between 2008 and 2012, we are told 80 times police officers were not indicted in shootings. Uhm, so … in the US there were only 11 non-indictments but 81 in one city in a span of four years. Something stinks in that data, here’s a clue. Dallas is in the US. The article goes on to note that with police shootings three things might be at play: jurors might be less willing to indict police officers, prosecutors who work with police might unconsciously work less hard to convict, and finally in high profile cases driven not by evidence by by politics there may be an absence of evidence to convict. This third alternative, which is certainly happened here, skips past Mr Schraub’s radar, oddly enough.
  3. Mr Schraub is troubled that ” Functionally speaking, a non-indictment decision suggests that the grand jury thought it was implausible that Darren Wilson was guilty.” What he skips past is that they examined all the evidence and that is how they concluded. Mr Schraub is about to  going to be skipping to racial prejudices (about police) it is worth noting that the jury had 3 Black individuals and 5 women.  He thinks “Whether or not we are sure to a “moral certainty” that Wilson is guilty, it seems difficult to be so confident at this stage that he is not guilty that we can justly neglect to look into it further.” Uhm. They looked at an incredible amount of evidence. Apparently they didn’t need to look further. He, with a lawyer’s magical thinking, figures that looking at the evidence isn’t enough. Apparently, you have to keep looking until you see the answer you expected before you started.
  4. And the dog barked in the night, or in the blog post anyhow. What, one lowly law-ignorant individual might ask the gnosis filled lawyer type, what Missouri law would a prosecutor accuse Mr Wilson of breaking and what would be required to prove (in a court) beyond reasonable doubt occurred? Might it be that the Grand Jury decided that such proof was not possible given the evidence so no point in wasting even more money on a trial? But that dog never showed up to bark in Mr Schraub’s deliberations.
  5. Then he gets to more pretend thinking, he offers, “This is such a difficult concept to grasp for White people, for whom it is not even a luxury but bedrock that if something scary happens to you, you call the police and they’ll protect you”. Uhm. Hello. Remember your friendly neighborhood President and his quote on the reliance of those stupid conservatives on “guns, god and whatnot”. Why do you figure “guns” is in the equation. Because those “White people” don’t actually depend all the time on the police like you pretend they do. They have guns in their houses and apply for concealed carry exactly because they fail to trust the police to the extent he pretends.
  6. ” I don’t want to overstate things — there are plenty of people for whom the Darren Wilson decision is proof that the thug kid got what he deserved — but I think even for some Whites out there ambivalent about this precise legal question,” Whatever. Look, figuring it was reasonable to not indict the police officer is not actually the same as saying “the kid got what he deserved”. It’s more about not making a second mistake to compound a tragedy. Seeing as Mr Schraub tacitly wishes for a miscarriage of justice so that he’d get Mr Wilson indicted and convicted his desire to avoid tragedy is misplaced.

Seems to me the liberal mindset is that if a grand jury spends a month going over hundreds of hours of testimony and finds nothing, that’s wrong. Irrespective of the testimony they should go back and keep pounding the testimony until the jury returns the result that the liberal establishment feels would best serve the community. Forget what happened, this should be about what we want to have happened so our narratives all work together. 1984, and all that. It’s not about what it true. It’s about what is needed. Guess that’s what a law degree gets you, a highly plastic ability to look at evidence.

It’s a strange world where liberals on one side of their mouth complain bitterly about inner city violence and that it should be curbed, yet at the same time rail against attempts to do exactly that. My decidedly faulty crystal ball predicts you won’t make any headway fixing inner city violence until you’ve fixed inner city family and marriage folkways.

Question for the economist, apparently the police in the last riots spent considerable efforts protecting the rioters against reprisals and defense of property by the ravaged-store owners. What incentives are at play here, why should we not expect more riots in the future? Riot, not for protest, merely for fun and profit. If there is little risk and gain to be had, why won’t there be more? On the other hand, jobs and commodity prices are higher in high crime areas. That price however is often blamed on (erroneously) on racism, not crime.

Silly things are done all over however, e.g., this. Our President, being the student of history, will tell us however that “this is understandable.” (see Albion’s Seed, Western Folkway). Understandable doesn’t make it a good idea.

A question by us non gnostic non-lawyers, here.

Filed under: Consider the FollowingCultureEthics & MoralityMark O.

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