Ferguson Prosecutor Admits He Knowingly Put Lying Witness Before Grand Jury

[Faryn Balyncd]

1. What is the correct response to repeated, deceitful prosecutorial behavior?

Last edited Sat Dec 20, 2014, 04:23 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