Ferguson prosecutor says witnesses in Darren Wilson case lied under oath
Source: The Guardian
Ferguson prosecutor says witnesses in Darren Wilson case lied under oath
Nicky Woolfin New York
theguardian.com, Friday 19 December 2014 20.43 GMT
Some witnesses who appeared before the grand jury investigating the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown were “clearly not telling the truth,” according to the St Louis county prosecutor, Robert McCulloch.
In his first public interview since announcing the grand jury’s decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson, McCulloch told local radio station KTRS that he had decided to put witnesses forward to testify regardless of their credibility.
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The admission came just days after The Smoking Gun, an investigative site which publishes government, police and other documents, claimed to have identified a key grand jury witness and raised serious questions about the credibility of her testimony.
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In her grand jury testimony, “Witness 40” described in detail how Michael Brown bent down “in a football position” and charged at officer Darren Wilson – an account often quoted in discussion of the case by rightwing commentators such as Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/19/ferguson-prosecutor-witnesses-darren-wilson-michael-brown
= new reply since forum marked as read
Over the phone right after that jury in Florida patted Trayvon Martin's murderer on the back, gave him a gold star and sent him on his way. . .
He laughed too! 
But they would feral - they woud believe it. Sick, sick, sick.
Since the DA has basically admitted that he knew and still brought this person before a grand jury so "all the evidence" could be heard on its face is an attempt to subvert the tribunal for other means.
He should be held and in all probability will be held in contempt and he should be brought before the bar to have his license looked at for ethics violations.
He knows that he cannot bring forth someone that has no credibility in proceedings of this kind.
Now the governor should or will have to call for a special prosecutor and reconvene the grand jury, there is no alternative unless they bring the case to the court for probable cause, which a independent team will have to do.
This hypocrite prosecutor is in big trouble, no one has right to determine the outcome of a case to justify the ends, and no one is above the law.
Last edited Sat Dec 20, 2014, 04:24 PM - Edit history (1)
McCullough has documented past history of lying to Grand Jury and to the press re: GJ testimony:
On the afternoon of June 12, 2000, two unarmed black men pulled into the parking lot of a Jack in the Box in the northern suburbs of St. Louis, just a few miles from where Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, earlier this month....In the car were Earl Murray, a small-time drug dealer, and his friend Ronald Beasley. Waiting for them were a dozen detectives. By the time Murray realized it was a sting, he was surrounded. Panicked, he put his car into reverse but slammed into a police SUV behind him. Two officers approaching the car from the front opened fire. Twenty-one shots rained down on Murray and Beasley.
In an ensuing investigation, the local prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, put the case to a grand jury, citizens who receive evidence under the instruction, questioning and watchful eye of the prosecutor to decide whether to press charges. The story presented to the grand jury was that Murray’s car moved toward the two officers, who then fired out of self-defense. The grand jury declined to indict the officers, and McCulloch said he agreed with the decision. . . . . . . . . . . .
Fourteen years ago, the two officers who shot Murray and Beasley were also invited to testify before the grand jury. Both men told jurors that Murray’s car was coming at them and that they feared being run over. McCulloch said that “every witness who was out there testified that it made some forward motion.” But a later federal investigation showed that the car had never come at the two officers: Murray never took his car out of reverse...An exhaustive St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigation found that only three of the 13 detectives who testified had said the car moved forward: the two who unloaded their guns and a third whose testimony was, as McCulloch admitted, “obviously…completely wrong.” McCulloch never introduced independent evidence to help clarify for the grand jury whether Murray’s car moved forward.
http://www.newsweek.com/ferguson-prosecutor-robert-p-mccullochs-long-history-siding-police-267357?piano_d=1
In 2000, in the so-called "Jack in the Box" case, two undercover officers, a police officer and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officer, shot and killed two unarmed black men in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box fast-food restaurant in Berkeley, Missouri. In 2001, the officers told a grand jury convened by McCulloch that the suspects tried to escape arrest and then drove toward them; the jury declined to indict. McCulloch told the public that every witness had testified to confirm this version, but St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Michael Sorkin reviewed the previously secret grand jury tapes, released to him by McCulloch, and found that McCulloch's statement was untrue: only three of 13 officers testified that the car was moving forward. A subsequent federal investigation found that the men were unarmed and that their car had not moved forward when the officers fired 21 shots; nevertheless, federal investigators decided that the shooting was justified because the officers feared for their safety. McCulloch also drew controversy when he said of the victims: "These guys were bums.". . . . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_P._McCulloch_%28prosecutor%29
In Texas, Former Williamson County prosecutor and later District Judge was disbarred, indicted, convicted and given a slap-on-the-wrist 10 day jail sentence for knowingly withholding favorable evidence. It would seem knowingly presenting false evidence, especially for a prosecutor with a documented history of lying, merits action:
Ken Anderson agreed to give up his law license and serve ten days in jail for hiding favorable evidence to secure Morton's 1987 conviction for a murder he did not commit.
The news last Friday that former Williamson County district judge Ken Anderson would have to serve jail time and forfeit his law license for withholding exculpatory evidence in the Michael Morton case was initially heralded as historic and unprecedented.
Anderson, who prosecuted Morton in 1987 for the murder of his wife, Christine, had long insisted that he had committed no wrongdoing, even after Morton was exonerated in 2011 by DNA evidence. But last week he finally capitulated, pleading no contest to felony charges of criminal contempt of court. The New York Times opined that Anderson’s ten-day jail sentence was “insultingly short” in comparison to the nearly 25 years that Morton spent behind bars, but added that “because prosecutors are so rarely held accountable for their misconduct, the sentence is remarkable nonetheless.” Mark Godsey, the director of the Ohio Innocence Project, took to the Huffington Post to declare that this marked “the first time ever” that a prosecutor had been sent to jail for withholding evidence. “What’s newsworthy and novel,” Godsey wrote, “is that a prosecutor was actually punished in a meaningful way for his transgressions.” . . . .
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/jail-time-may-be-least-ken-anderson%E2%80%99s-problems
