Prosecutors and District Attorneys are elected by the voters while State’s Attorneys are generally appointed by the Governor of the State. The commonality is that their livelihood hinges on their political support. The result is that they literally throw cops “under the bus” to appease a segment of the community who are screaming for blood.
This began in 1991 with the Rodney King case. The Los Angeles District Attorney got a Grand Jury to indict four LA cops, only to lose the case at trial. It is widely known that a skilled prosecutor can get a seated Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich and that has proven out in case after case throughout the country. As the prosecution determines what evidence the Grand Jury will hear, their ability to obtain indictments is skewed.
When a prosecutor actually presents all of the available information, as in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, the likelihood is no indictment. When prosecutors decide to play politics with hot-button cases, as in Baltimore and Cincinnati, indictments that are destined to fail is the result.
Marilyn Mosby, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney stood before a press conference and made it clear that she was willing to railroad cops to appease the protestors. She charged six officers with felony crimes in the death Freddie Gray. One officer’s trial ended in a hung jury, two others resulted in not guilty verdicts and then she decided to forgo the rest.
Joe Deters, the Hamilton County, Ohio prosecutor stood before a press conference in the death of Samuel Dubose by Raymond Tensing, a University of Cincinnati police officer, and called for the disbanding of a State University Police Department. Tensing’s first trial ended in a hung jury and his second trial is scheduled for late May, 2017.
What would appear to the easiest of the high profile cases also resulted in a hung jury. A North Charleston, South Carolina police officer was captured on video shooting an unarmed man running away from him. His retrial will be coming sometime in 2017.
Charging officers with Murder for an on-duty shooting is an extremely high bar for the prosecution to reach. It requires the intent of “purposeful” or proving that the death occurred during the commission of a felony.
Murder charges have resulted in not guilty verdicts in Texas and Kentucky. The South Carolina and Ohio cases have yet to reach a conclusion, and the Illinois case has yet to go to trial.
A Federal prosecution under Section 1983 of the United States Code is a more successful avenue because the violation of Civil Rights has no intent clause attached. When the California prosecution failed in the King case, the Department of Justice made an unprecedented move charging the officers under the Federal law. The cases of two officers actually reached the United States Supreme Court, who ruled, among other things, that the double jeopardy provision of the Constitution did not apply.
There have been two successful prosecutions of police officers in deadly force cases. In 2014, a Bay Area Regional Transit policeman, involved in a use of deadly force situation, was convicted of Manslaughter and sentenced to prison. A rookie New York City police officer was convicted of Manslaughter in 2016 for a deadly force incident in Long Island. The common denominator in both of these cases that likely resulted in convictions was their statements to investigators. Those statements were admitted at trial.
Charging under State laws is difficult, at best, because they were not written for law enforcement encounters. As the average police deadly force encounter lasts approximately 3.2 seconds, It is generally a reaction to training, whether the force is justified or not. That makes it extremely difficult for a jury to understand and reach a decision.