StrangeSox

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 02:33 PM) How's that any different from me saying that there was a robbery committed in the city of Chicago yesterday and I thought it must be a black kid, and hey, I was right? Pretty sure that's an unfair presumption despite it being statistically more likely true than not. yep

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 02:32 PM) Total #'s don't prove anything. Show me the rate of criminal activity. What percent of murders in this country are committed by black males? What percent of shooting incidents with cops as intended targets are committed by blacks versus whites? Years ago there were unfair drug sentences, but that's been gone for decades. The skin color doesn't matter, your address matters. Shoot, last night there were hundreds of shots fired at or around police during a protest (and a murder, btw). When's the last time a bunch of white people rioted and shot at police? Crime statistics themselves aren't independent of enforcement and prosecution. For example, blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, but blacks face a much, much higher rate of prosecution and incarceration for petty drug offenses. Drug sentences are still biased against crack users, which mainly skews black. They're not quite as bad as they were before, but even that change has only been within the last couple of years. Sentences for similar crimes still have big gaps. You're not wrong when you say "address matters," but that's because we still live in a pretty heavily segregated society. And you're not wrong when you say that poverty plays an important role, but the heavy-handed enforcement and mass incarceration of so many black males only deepens that cycle of poverty.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 02:28 PM) lol, man to be fair you can find a racial subtext behind anything. there's a long and well-documented history of this being done explicitly. hell, they were literally treated as beasts of burden for about a quarter of a millennium on this continent. saying that black people have often been portrayed as unintelligent simpletons and brutes bordering on animalistic behavior isn't some sort of crazy leftwing theory.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 02:15 PM) I covered this pages ago. It's based on the perceived lack of the higher cognitive ability to know the difference between right and wrong and the ability to restrain ourselves. That's not exactly downplaying the racial stereotyping linked with calling a bunch of black people animals, though, because that's just another racist stereotype. Just to be clear because I can't think of a way to rephrase that sentence, I'm not saying you're racist or what you just said was racist but pointing out the racial subtext behind calling a bunch of black people animals.

QUOTE (MexSoxFan#1 @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 02:14 PM) Lol, where did I call ALL white people racists? Please point it out. I said white people don't understand minorities mistrust of the police and somehow you took that as me calling all whites racists? Really dude? My mom was white, yes there are white people in Mexico, you know Spain is in Europe, ignorant idiots don't know that. How the hell am I going to racist towards a part of what I am, lol. Get out of here. I haven't read this article beyond the headline but I imagine it gets to this issue. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archiv...erguson/378928/

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 02:05 PM) Oh i've heard it. I've heard there's an "epidemic" of police acting "with impunity" towards blacks. I don't really buy it though. I do think there is a class issue when it comes to policing, but not a racial one (directly anyway). It's hard to argue that it's not both.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 02:08 PM) I understand some of you are angry, with every right to be, but it's not suddenly acceptable to show your anti-white racism here, nor is it open season on white people that did nothing wrong to you, ever. It seems that in light of this event, some of you opportunists are deciding to take this moment to show your true colors and expect any and all white people to just shut up and take it. Well, if this is you, you can go f*** yourself. Racism isn't ok no matter what color you are. kill all white people

but hey, Texas executes people with far, far weaker cases than this one, so

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 02:03 PM) A real jury trial would require the prosecutor to create an absolutely ridiculous theory of the crime to try and wedge into the facts of physical evidence. I don't see that benefiting anybody. No, it wouldn't, and I really don't know why you keep saying that. Non-expert questions based on a non-expert understanding of the crime scene from a Grand Juror aren't exactly strong evidence.

If the ultimate result of this is that prosecutors across the country stop pressing charges in cases with much weaker evidence than this one, that's more important than an individual officer in a single case. I don't actually expect that to be the trend, though, even for McCulloch.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 01:02 PM) You have a community that thinks nothing more than "unarmed black teen dead, all cops hate black people." Evidence, trials, whatever isn't going to appease them. See: Martin, Trayvon. I know I linked to it a while back, but here's Randy Balko's piece again on why this community might not exactly have the best opinion of law enforcement. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-wat...s-from-poverty/

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 12:46 PM) Splattered back 20+ feet in a narrow, straight line? You don't need to be a blood spatter expert to know that is pretty much impossible. If a prosecutor tried to use that as his theory in prosecuting the officer, he'd be laughed out of the courtroom. I'm not exactly seeing "narrow, straight line" in that testimony. Another part of the problem with a GJ not being a public process. We don't have the diagram they're referring to yet, and we don't get to see the whole flow of how the trial went. Even if it's not 20 feet, it's going to be more than 0 feet, right? So that immediately puts us at less than 20 feet of advancing towards Wilson. And we're also not sure of exactly where they're measuring to get the distance to Brown's body. Just to his feet? His torso? His head? A real jury trial could help everyone, jurors included, make a lot more sense out of this evidence and what it actually means. As it is, we've got a grand juror drawing their own conclusion and a non-expert detective kinda sorta confirming it but not really because they rightfully said they're not an expert.

Speigel/Mannelly/Boers/Bernstein were just talking about Trestman's track record at his various stops around the league. Apparently, he's always started year one with a good/great offense followed up with a horrendous offense in year two. Only one team has kept him around more than two years. Not exactly a good sign.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 12:29 PM) He was already bleeding when he ran away from Wilson, yet where he ends up dead is 20+ feet closer than the farthest blood trail, so at some point he had to turn around and head back towards Wilson. If he was never coming right at Wilson, there couldn't be blood farther away. ok, page 89/90 of this document: http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/137...-volume-24.html Note that this is the conclusion that a Grand Juror reached, not expert testimony, and the detective explicitly says he's not a blood spatter expert when asked by the Grand Juror if the blood could simply have splattered that far back from a stationary Brown*. I don't see the diagram they're referring to available anywhere, but the detective him or herself never definitively states the forensic conclusion the GJ drew. *that's another way that this is not like a regular trial at all, GJ's ask questions, plus I can't imagine the detective's non-expert thoughts on the blood pattern would stand up in a real trial.

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 12:31 PM) Then don't take it before the Grand Jury period. Don't charge. The ultimate result is the same - community outrage. What we have here is a community that doesn't feel served by the justice system. Who suspects that if the police made an arrest on conflicting stories (police say one thing, witnesses say another) that the prosecutor wouldn't have presented both sides of the argument. He would have gotten his indictment and moved on. That's the problem. Prosecutors try cases on weak evidence all the time. For right or wrong, the perception in the Ferguson community is going to be that the prosecutor did Wilson a favor and went out of his way to not get an indictment. If we really are going to see prosecutors adopt a "conflicting witness testimony means no charge" standard, we should see huge drops in our prosecution and incarceration rates.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 12:23 PM) What a s*** article. "i'm not saying he's lying, i just find it difficult to believe!" Yeah, it's difficult to believe that massive teenager who just assaulted a guy in a store would talk so disrespectfully to a police officer! Totally incomprehensible! It's not about being "disrespectful" as much as it being cartoonish in what and when he said it. It's like Zimmerman saying Martin shouted out "you got me!" like something out of a bad Western.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 12:11 PM) CNN has been reading it from the official grand jury report all morning. I just found the video clip of it. http://therightscoop.com/cnn-analyst-reads...brown-shooting/ I'm not sure how you can conclude what she does there without more information. Brown was already shot and bleeding when he turned and ran from Wilson. How did they determine if the blood came from the initial wound or the subsequent wounds?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 12:18 PM) I mean I don't have a problem criticizing them for that, I guess. That would have been preferable. But it still doesn't really change the evidence or ultimately what the GJ decided. If a DA who isn't actively working to avoid charges being made is running the GJ, it very easily could have.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 12:16 PM) But you and I both know that him making a unilateral decision to not bring charges would not have been sufficient to appease people. You'd be crying about him being a corrupt prosecutor backing his friends at the PD. You're right in that I think there's sufficient evidence that a charge should have been brought. I'm explicitly saying he's being corrupt and providing a shield for the PD. He has a personal history that plays into it and a professional history of him doing exactly that. But him using a sham GJ to cover his own ass is a separate issue still. He'd look bad unilaterally deciding not to bring charges, but he looks even worse with the sham GJ. Even what your partners said indicates that it was a sham from the start: they didn't think an indictment should have been issued; it easily could have been if the prosecutor wanted it; he was using the GJ as a cover to not issue the indictment. You can think that charges weren't warranted while still believing that the GJ was run as a sham.

Ezra Klein: Officer Darren Wilson's story is unbelievable. Literally.

http://www.vox.com/2014/11/25/7280989/darren-wilson-evidence

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 12:09 PM) Blood trail shows Brown's farthest position away from Wilson being 20+ feet away from where he fell, spacing of blood trail shows speed. A good portion of the witness accounts back up the evidence. source?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 11:42 AM) So in order to appease the masses, the prosecutor should bring charges and force a cop to be charged with murder? That's the best option here? Or, as others have asked for since the start, bring in an outside DA to evaluate and pursue the case.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 11:18 AM) I don't see how making it a larger fact finding process is more of a sham than putting on select witnesses in order to get an indictment simply because he could. That's why i'm lol'ing. You're claiming some injustice was done here when the real injustice would be to indict the guy and make him go through a whole trial and waste taxpayer money on sure-loser case. I'm saying that putting it through a completely atypical "fact finding" grand jury is a sham. If the prosecutor didn't think it merited charges, he should have explained why himself instead of holding a sham GJ to, in your words, cover his ass. If you're so concerned about "taxpayer money" in the criminal justice system, you shouldn't be happy with an unnecessary sham GJ.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 25, 2014 -> 11:08 AM) So to be clear here: In order to prevent an unarmed black teen from being shot after attacking a cop and allegedly rushing after him a second time, we should create an entire new court system to handle the potential charges and trial, right? No, that's what this "mock-trial" you keep saying he ran was. We already have a normal court system that can handle these things.