The Day After In Ferguson
By on November 25, 2014
Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
A police officer guards a closed street along the West
Florissant Ave, where protesters and looters rampaged businesses
following the grand jury decision in the fatal shooting of Michael
Brown.
Right from the beginning, when Governor Jay Nixon refused to name a special prosecutor and left the case in the hands of Bob McCulloch, the greasy and hopelessly conflicted local district attorney, this case was headed for the biggest public fix since the 1919 World Series. The people in Ferguson knew it. The police knew it. Even Nixon knew it; he declared a state of emergency a week before the grand jury's decision was handed down. McCulloch simply abandoned his duties as a prosecutor and dumped the evidence on the members of the grand jury without giving them any direction at all. Both of them relied, tacitly, on the fact that they knew the benefits they all would get of the thousand doubts that we give to the people we empower to take another person's life—"under the color of law," as the legal jargon has it, and in this case that couldn't be more ironic.
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