It’s Totally Fine To Assault Capitol Police
I’d like to thank all the members of the Grand Jury today who failed to indict Cynthia McKinney for assaulting a Capitol Police Officer with her cell phone a month or so ago. You have made it totally okay for people to hit cops, get away with it, and come off looking like the victim. Way to go. Here’s hoping someone clocks you this weekend, so you can see just how badly you fucked up.
If you wonder why people don’t think DC should have its own representation in Congress, or any of the other myriad things that I’m sure some community activists will claim the Man is doing to Hold Them Down, look no further than this paragraph from the Post:
The grand jury found “no probable cause” after an “extensive and thorough” investigation, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
What, exactly, was the grand jury examining in an extensive and thorough manner? The insides of their eyelids while evidence was presented? Were they reading off the Jesse Jackson crib sheet? Or was it more like, “well, she didn’t give him a black eye, and besides, racism.”?
What a fucked up world we live in. If I’d done this, they’d have slammed my ass in jail so fast my head would still be spinning. If it had been Patrick Kennedy, he’d have admitted it, claimed to be on prescription sleeping meds and in a hurry to go vote. If it’d been one of the guys at Wonkette, we’d be reading on their blog about who else they saw inside the DC jail, and how their Facebook profiles were doing.
But that’s not what happened. What happened was a black woman hit a cop with her cellphone, when they had the audacity to stop her from jumping the security line. When she came under fire, clearly it was the guard’s fault for stopping her, forcing her hand to her cellphone and her cellphone to the cop’s face. Clearly, the guard was a racist. Clearly, she had to act.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is just how fucked up DC can be sometimes.
I don’t know anything about the facts of this case beyond what appeared in the newspapers. But I did serve on a grand jury some years ago and know how that is, and I can’t imagine that each and every juror acted as reckless as this post alleges. We don’t know what facts they were presented and the basis of this decision. Being a grand juror is a thankless job, a real hardship if you still have work to do, and the people I served with were in no mood to be push overs and I met some good people. I suspect the same is true here for this jury. Give this group the benefit of doubt. They deserve it.
If this weren’t a completely OPEN AND SHUT CASE, kob, I’d agree with you. But she hit the cop. With her cellphone. Admitted it to the public. It was witnessed by others around. There’s probably video of her hitting the cop.
I have every respect for the person that decides to go serve their jury summons, grand jury, county court jury, what have you. But if you get something like this so blatantly wrong…
Then man, gotta question what the heck they were doing during the hearing.
Tom – how does this case surprise you? She is a Rep, she will get off. She is black, she will get off. She is important and black – hahahahah!
Grand juries can only consider information presented to them. Prosecutors can cherry pick what a grand jury hears to bloster odds of indictment. The government is not required to present mitigating evidence; there’s no defense attorney in the grand jury room. A grand jury case is entirely a prosecution show. Moreover, the threshold for indictment is well below the standard set for petit juries. It’s why grand juries indict in the overwhelming majority of cases. If there’s any failure here, it has to be with government prosecutors and the case they presented. In my mind, any questions about the outcome must be directed to the government. It was their responsibility to make an indictment an inescapable conclusion for the grand jury to reach and that obviously didn’t happen. It’s really, really hard to imagine that the grand jury — a diverse group of men and women — would ignore a compelling set of facts, an open and shut case as you see it, the law, and then vote on the basis of some collective agenda that was absolutely counter to everything they heard. That’s the least likely explanation and the major reason why I wouldn’t accuse the grand jury of acting irresponsibly. Secondarily, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the press reports — the reports that give this the appearence of an open and shut case — are wrong about some aspects. A whole different world and set of facts can emerge once lawyers dissect witnesses under oath.
Finally, something I can agree with Tom about!
I don’t see how you can dismiss the decision so easily without having been in the grand jury room and having seen and heard the same evidence they did. Once you sit down and look at actual evidence and the actual law that applies to the incident, an apparent open-and-shut case can fall apart pretty quickly. Cases are not tried in the media for good reason.
Be that as it may, John, it’s absolutely astounding that she got away with assaulting a Capitol Police officer who is generally charged with protecting her safety.
1) She publicly admitted that she hit him. That’s a statement against interest and highly likely to make it into testimony. If not, the Attorney General ought to be fired.
2) She was likely caught on videotape hitting the officer. Barring that, the officer’s testimony, or those who saw it happened, would be all that was necessary.
This is a bad, bad day for the District anyway you look at it.
First, I don’t know what you’re upset about really. A Congressperson committed a crime a got away with it. I’m not even sure that’s news.
Second, you have no idea what evidence was presented or how the grand jury deliberated. Have you ever been on a grand jury?
Third, the idea that this now tells everyone it’s OK to hit a cop is stupid. What it does is tell defense attorneys that there is precedent for hitting a cop and not getting indicted.