Twitter is full of comments about the Ferguson grand jury decision that show many writers have no idea about a fundamental right under the U.S. Constitution.
Those commentators argue that the grand jury should have charged Police Officer Darren Wilson with a crime for killing unarmed teenager Michael Brown, even if the jurors believed the evidence failed to support an indictment.
Typical of the comments were:
And:
The actions those writers advocated would violate the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, according to many legal scholars. Most Americans think of the Fifth Amendment as the right of defendants to refuse to testify against themselves in a trial.
But the first part of the amendment is a requirement that a grand jury issue a
legitimate indictment before any defendant is brought to court.
“A number of commentators have argued … that even if the evidence was insufficient to indict Officer Darren Wilson, justice would have been better served if the grand jury had indicted anyway,” former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy wrote Tuesday
for National Review.
“That way, the reasoning goes, we could have had a public trial in the light of day where everyone could have seen that the case was insufficient. That, we are to believe, would have made it easier for the community to accept the result.”
McCarthy, the New York federal attorney who prosecuted the terrorist convicted of trying to destroy the World Trade Center in 1995, added that “rabble-rousers” wanted Wilson charged with a crime “despite the lack of probable-cause evidence.”
“The Fifth Amendment holds that a person has the right not to be subjected to a public trial – i.e., the right not to be indicted — unless the state can prove to a grand jury that there is probable cause to believe he committed a crime,” McCarthy wrote.
“Officer Wilson had a constitutional right not to be indicted in the absence of sufficient evidence. That right to individual liberty outweighs the media’s abstract claim that a public trial would serve the public interest.”
Arthur Aidala, a defense lawyer and commentator on Fox News, noted that the prosecution’s case would
never have survived a public trial.
“If this was in front of a regular jury … there’d be a defense attorney ripping those witnesses apart,” he said. “There never would have been a conviction.”
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