In the critical first minutes after a shooting, investigators are trained to follow a time-tested process of protecting the scene to ensure that evidence is not compromised, according to the experts and documents. A shooting suspect — even a police officer — must be cordoned off in a controlled area and stripped of his clothing, his weapon secured by investigators, and must be escorted by officers if he leaves.

“An officer driving himself back? Wrong. An officer booking his own gun into evidence? Wrong,” said David Klinger, an expert on police shootings with the University of Missouri at St. Louis who is also a former police officer. “The appropriate investigative procedures were not followed.’’
<snip>
Read the rest about how the shooting was investigated.
More:http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/seemingly-unorthodox-police-procedures-emerge-in-grand-jury-documents/2014/11/25/48152574-74e0-11e4-bd1b-03009bd3e984_story.html

Seriously. After watching crime shows, reading real-life police stories and detective novels, I could have produced better results that would be fairly accurate.

Justice Antonin Scalia Explains What Was Wrong With The Ferguson Grand Jury

On Monday, Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced that a grand jury had decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown. But that decision was the result of a process that turned the purpose of a grand jury on its head.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in the 1992 Supreme Court case of United States v. Williams, explained what the role of a grand jury has been for hundreds of years.

This passage was first highlighted by attorney Ian Samuel, a former clerk to Justice Scalia.

In contrast, McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours before the grand jury and presented them with every scrap of exculpatory evidence available. In his press conference, McCulloch said that the grand jury did not indict because eyewitness testimony that established Wilson was acting in self-defense was contradicted by other exculpatory evidence. What McCulloch didn’t say is that he was under no obligation to present such evidence to the grand jury. The only reason one would present such evidence is to reduce the chances that the grand jury would indict Darren Wilson.
<snip>
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/11/26/3597322/justice-scalia-explains-what-was-wrong-with-the-ferguson-grand-jury/

OVER to you SCOTUS.

An announcement to say a verdict has been reached will be made at 4pm. The verdict will be announced later. (Unconfirmed) This may change.

This is from ongoing tweets from reliable sources. I am sure the family has been notified.
The announcement part sounds like a hot mess. Why should it be any different than this whole ordeal and process I guess?

@sdkstl: Now the news column is moving: @WesleyLowery: '
Solid sourcing' #DarrenWilson GJ is in. Presser later today. What will be announced TBD.

Many tweets from reliable sources about this. The time has not been announced. I am waiting on more info.

Presser later today: WaPo link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/grand-jury-reaches-decision-in-case-of-ferguson-officer/2014/11/24/de48e7e4-71d7-11e4-893f-86bd390a3340_story.html

@jbjpublisher:
Rattled tonight by text and call from daughter at #FSU while in library during shooting. Praying for all involved.


I can't even....

John Doar, a country lawyer from northern Wisconsin who led the federal government’s on-the-ground efforts to dismantle segregation in the South, and who later headed the team that made the case for impeaching President Richard M. Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92. The cause was congestive heart failure, his son Robert said.

During the most volatile period of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, it was Mr. Doar, along with a federal marshal, who escorted James Meredith when he integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962. It was Mr. Doar who led the successful prosecution of the men who killed three young civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. And it was Mr. Doar who defused a dramatic standoff between bottle-throwing civil rights protesters and police officers with their guns drawn in Jackson, Miss.

“He was the face of the Justice Department in the South,” President Obama said in 2012 when he presented Mr. Doar with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. “He was proof that the federal government was listening.”

In 1974, Mr. Doar, a Republican, was named by Democrats to be chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee investigating Watergate.

Mr. Doar prosecuted some of the most notorious cases of murder and violence in the South in the ‘60s, and was instrumental in changing the region’s pattern of race-based politics based on voter discrimination.
<snip>
Much more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/us/john-doar-federal-lawyer-in-battle-against-segregation-dies-at-92.html

RIP John Doar!
You fought the good fight. You will be missed.

It is not a good feeling. The good news is that there is still a Democratic President who better veto the hell out of the crazy shit that crosses his desk.

Be glad if you live in a state with a good Democratic party and representation. That hopefully will provide some insulation from the lunacy.

The SC mention is a reference to realizing that those in charge of overall policy are crazy, mean, and stupid. The only thing that has kept SC from falling into the Atlantic Ocean is the fact that there is so much internecine fighting in our GOP that they rarely agree on much. This may keep the US Senate tied up for a while because Ted Cruz will probably challenge The Turtle for leadership of the Senate. We can hope.

Gonna go get another beer....or three....

Awwww....

http://mashable.com/2014/11/01/nina-pham-reunites-dog/

Happy!