Balta1701

QUOTE (bear_brian @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 05:15 PM) Are you aware that Hamels is a lefty??? All. the. Lefties.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 04:35 PM) Or you could just give money, acquire a slightly inferior player in Asdrubal Cabrera or Stephen Drew, and keep your prospect of the future. And if the Dodgers are willing to let their playoff hopes next year ride on those 2 guys, I say more power to them.

QUOTE (Charlie Haeger's Knuckles @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 04:21 PM) The Dodgers are NOT trading Corey Seager. This would be like the White Sox trading Tim Anderson for 2 years of Alexei Ramirez if he weren't already on the team. The Dodgers want a stopgap player until Seager is ready for MLB, trading Seager for a stopgap veteran makes exactly ZERO sense. If the White Sox were a team that had just won a division and made the playoffs 2 years in a row and lost a key part of their infield to free agency, then Tim Anderson for 2 years of Alexei Ramirez would sound pretty decent to me.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 03:43 PM) Do you think we should always ask grand juries to sort through all possible evidence when there's an issue of facts, or isn't that normally left to trial juries? I don't think we let that happen in either case. In the case of a trial jury, each side presents the evidence they feel is necessary to prove the case they're making. They don't call every single witness or introduce every single bit of medical evidence for a reason; they filter it down to what they feel is necessary to make a strong case. The prosecution and defense are supposed to have the same piles of evidence and statements of witnesses to work off of, so that neither side hides anything, but in the case of a trial neither side would have called most of these witnesses.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 03:02 PM) Some countries e.g. France don't have an adversarial system but I'm pretty sure they don't just dump a ton of information on a bunch of jurors and expect them to sort it out. That's an Antonin Scalia quote from a decision in the early 90s, in case people haven't seen that today.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:46 PM) Correct. But it's also clear his goal wasn't to get an indictment simply because he could (and he could have). He wanted a grand jury, people of the county, to decide that with all of the potential information, good or bad, in front of them. How you guys think that is a less judicious process is beyond me. How you see that as a more judicious process than an adversarial trial is equally beyond me.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:40 PM) I agree. But again, if he fails to provide that information to the grand jury, and they decide not to indict, you're all over his ass for not giving the grand jury all of the known evidence, whether it's admissible later at trial or not. No one on Earth would be angry at him not giving the grand jury hearsay or for him not presenting witnesses who had recanted their story. Well, maybe the officer.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:31 PM) THAT'S THE INFORMATION YOU WANTED THE GRAND JURY TO HAVE!!!!!!!! You are literally arguing against yourselves here. You're saying that the prosecutor performed a terrible job because he put witnesses in front of the grand jury WITH HELPFUL INFORMATION that would support charges. You're saying he should have EXCLUDED helpful witnesses to getting a trial in this case. That makes zero sense. He wanted the grand jury to have hearsay and you support this?!

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:29 PM) NO! His job is to determine if there's enough evidence to bring charges. He's not performing his duties if he essentially excuses bulls*** evidence in order to get an indictment. And he's also not doing his job if he knows witness statements are bull plop and presents them to the GJ anyway. In an actual trial, what would be your reaction if a prosecutor called someone to the stand and then under cross examination admitted they were basing their statements on hearsay? That actually happened in this case and the prosector's office was the one doing the cross examination.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:26 PM) How does the prosecutor know these are faulty witnesses? They claim to be witnesses, and the prosecutor would get hammered if he didn't present them. QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:26 PM) "I heard my friend say that she saw" should never have been presented to the GJ if it in fact was. That's intentionally sloppy work by the prosecutors to even bring these people in without screening them first.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:26 PM) God Balta, you are so out of your element on this one. Seriously. You're arguing against yourself here. You want a pro-prosecutor to exclude things like hearsay evidence that SUPPORTS the charges you wanted him to bring. You don't think that calling witnesses and asking if they previously lied is prejudicial?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:22 PM) Another indication that he wanted all potential facts out there for the grand jury to decide. With no evaluation of any of them, even before their presentations apparently, which is about as poor of a job of a prosecutor doing as I could ever imagine.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:20 PM) Several people who initially claimed to be eyewitnesses to the event did not admit until actually testifying to the grand jury under oath that they were not actually eyewitnesses but passing along what friends who had claimed to be eyewitnesses had told them. This was cited by the prosecuting attorney as one of the main factors in the decision since these were mostly the witnesses claiming he was shot in the back and/or had his hands up when shot. So you actually wrote that and want to tell me that the prosecutor did an effective job and did not prejudice the jury by presenting faulty witnesses? Good lord.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:18 PM) A pair of NY Times journalists printed a story that included Wilson's new home address. In less than two hours, several blogs had posted the home address of the journalists. Somebody needs to keep this going by posting the home addresses of the bloggers who posted the home addresses of the journalists who posted Wilson's home address. Yeah, none of that should be happening and on that I'll totally agree. Who from the NY Times actually did that?

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:16 PM) Most of the statements put out there are hearsay since they didnt actually witness the event. I understand the definition. So out of the 60 "witnesses" presented to the grand jury, "Most" of them didn't actually see the event, but the prosecutor presented them to the grand jury anyway?

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:13 PM) I think all police shootings should be examined very deeply, I am not sure if an actual public trial is the solution but there has to be investigation in general into everything surrounding it. In this case I havent seen anything other than heresay that would be used as evidence against the officer. You really need to research the definition of Hearsay. A witness statement is by definition not "hearsay". The way you just used it, the officer's testimony is "hearsay".

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:06 PM) With the level of evidence presented to the Grand Jury, it should be obvious that a conviction is impossible. No it isn't in the least. There needs to be some actual filtering done of the evidence. The police officer's statements of him turning into the hulk would be demolished by an actual cross examination. There needed to be an actual investigation by a qualified person of which witness accounts actually hold up, which don't, and how do those fit with the physical evidence at the scene. It could be entirely possible that when you line up the witnesses with the actual physical evidence, a group of them all fall out immediately due to not having been able to see what they claimed to see and a much clearer story emerges. A wise man once said "a courtroom is a crucible, in it we burn away irrelevancy until we are left with a purer product, the truth". Instead, 60 different witnesses were presented to people with no filter and they had to figure out how to process them, with no one other than themselves to ask questions and no experts brought in to do things like give counterpoints to presented physical evidence. This is why we have an adversarial system, so that you don't end up with the person who is supposed to be prosecuting a shooter defending that shooter in a press conference while saying "and this is when the final 10 shots were fired".

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 02:03 PM) Balta killed Michael Brown. I was there. I saw it. Balta denies it. Let's charge him and go through a trial because there's conflicting evidence. At least an unarmed person who was shot to death would have a day in court.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 01:59 PM) And yet when that happens the losing side still claim bias. First step is to determine if there is even a reason to waste time and money to debate those statement or conflicting evidence. And considering where this conversation has gone and the level of evidence presented in the Grand Jury, there absolutely seems to be reason to be.

You know, it's really a shame we don't have some system in this country for evaluating the veracity of competing claims and evidence when it comes to determining the guilt or innocence of a person after a shooting like this. You know, maybe where 2 opposing sides present their version of a story and some group of impartial people evaluates those 2 presentations. We should've written that into the constitution or something. We're just stuck debating it on message boards because of that failure.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 10:56 AM) See above. There was also no defense attorney cross examining the same witnesses and poking a hole in a lot of their versions. Thank you for now agreeing that there should have been a case made by an unaffiliated special prosecutor. That's what should have happened and it's nice to see you now agree that this process was faulty.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 10:55 AM) I don't think that's been shown? You're right, the elbow shot isn't well described in the press reports I'm now checking. Retract that statement.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 10:51 AM) I mean, best case i'm not taking their claims to be very credible. If they're going to report that he was shot down from behind (and that's not true) anything else they say, especially that Wilson supposedly pulled Brown into the car first, isn't very credible to me. And so since most of the witnesses who say they saw the final shot do not describe Brown as charging at him while the officer does, you're going to find the officer's testimony equally uncredible, right?

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 10:50 AM) Given the physical altercation that had already happened, it doesn't really matter how quickly Brown is moving towards Wilson. Once he gets that close, self defense is fully justified. The prosecuting attorney during his press conference mentioned witnesses who initially said the fatal shots were fired from behind. I haven't yet verified that in the transcript. He was shot from behind but it wasn't the fatal shots. He was definitely shot while fleeing. The thing that an intelligent prosecutor would do is attempt to see which witnesses could actually have seen that, which ones couldn't have, and how those things piece together. It is included within even the officer's testimony that shots were fired while he was running. If you hear like 5 gunshots ring out as a witness even at a distance, are you going to stand and watch or are you going to take cover before the last volley is fired? And then are you going to remember specifically which ones you saw do what? Very unlikely. Then you leave it to a group of non-experts in a grand jury to piece together those details and expect anything other than the grand jury throwing up their hands?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 26, 2014 -> 10:45 AM) This isn't really THAT important of a distinction. I mean, you've got the victim of an assault reporting what he was seeing. He's hopped up on adrenaline and just killed someone. You have others from a distance seeing a guy move towards another guy. I've had this same problem in cases where some witnesses claim a bus jerked violently forward and others say it just stopped. A lot of that stuff is pretty relative. And you have others saying he was stumbling and barely able to control his movements after being hit.