Via the phenomenal Kim Katrin Milan;
“A data point from FiveThirtyEight’s coverage of Monday night’s events in Ferguson is worth pulling out. “U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010,” the site’s Ben Casselman writes, “the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.”
That data is from a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and covers October 1, 2009, to September 30, 2010. Over that time period, over 193,000 federal offenses were investigated, about 16 percent of which were declined for prosecution. That leaves just over 162,300 offenses that the government tried to prosecute. And the grand jury decided against doing so 11 times, finding no true bill or a lack of evidence to do so.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…/the-rarity-of-a-federal-g…/…
This is INCREDIBLY important. I’ve noticed a lot of people seem to misunderstand. The non-indictment was not about a conviction or a guilty/innocent sentence for Darren Wilson. This was about whether or not there was enough evidence to take him to trial in the first place. Had he been put on trial, the odds of him being convicted would have been even lower.
Notice how incredibly rare it is to not grant a case the bare minimum of a trial. Especially in the face of conflicting testimonies and overwhelming evidence that there is more to the story, it’s outrageous (racist) that the Grand Jury would come to such a rare conclusion.
There are a few more routes to justice at this point, although their effectiveness is debatable:
-The Justice Department can press federal charges (they’re being urged by the National Bar Association to do so)
-The Justice Department can bring charges against Ferguson PD
-The Brown family can bring a civil suit against Darren Wilson
(It’s worth noting that many civil rights era cases needed to go to the federal government before anything got done.)”
brittanyjacqueline 