A prosecutor should have weighed charges against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, not a grand jury, former Department of Justice deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo says.
"I don't think it's fair. Grand juries are already going to be pretty susceptible to prosecution. Defense lawyers always say a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich if the prosecutors wanted them to," Yo said Monday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
"So already they're going to be predisposed to the prosecution's case and then to talk about all this other political pressure and the media trying to demand the indictment of the police officer in Ferguson makes you wonder whether he's getting a fair shake.
"In this case, often it's better for the prosecutors to make the decision because the prosecutor's ultimately responsible to the people who are elected in Missouri, the attorney general and ultimately the governor."
He said a grand jury may feel obligated to bow to media and public pressure.
Story continues below video.
Note: Watch Newsmax TV now on DIRECTV Ch. 349 and DISH Ch. 223
Get Newsmax TV on your cable system – Click Here Now
"And then they're anonymously gone after they make their decision so they don't suffer any consequences for a wrong decision, said Yoo, a Berkeley Law professor and author of
"Point of Attack: Preventive War, International Law, and Global Welfare," published by Oxford University Press.
A grand jury has reached a decision on the actions of Wilson, a white police officer who shot unarmed black teen Michael Brown, touching off weeks of racial unrest in the St. Louis suburb. The verdict is expected to be made public late Monday.
On President Barack Obama's declaration that he was just following in the footsteps of other commanders-in-chief with his executive order to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, Yoo said:
"President Obama is misrepresenting our history. I don't think that President [Ronald] Reagan or President George H.W. Bush did anything approaching the refusal to deport 5 million illegal immigrants in the country.
"What they were doing in both cases is they were working with the Congress that was in the midst of passing immigration reform at that time to try to fill in gaps in the statutes.
"So you've got numbers that are in both cases were never over 1 million and were very narrow and limited and trying to actually do what Congress wanted while it was in the course of passing the statute … President Obama has gone way beyond what the Constitution permits …"
He said Congress is somewhat limited in what it can do to combat the executive order.
"A lot of the options are legally or constitutionally available but politically impossible," he said.
"Impeachment is actually what the framers [of the Constitution] intended for Congress to control a president like President Obama who's abusing his constitutional authority. But impeachment's impractical," he said.
"You don't have 67 votes in the Senate, you're not going to have it for the next two years to impeach President Obama. So a lawsuit by Congress isn't going to work because the Supreme Court generally doesn't let Congress file suit against the president.
"But there is one actor who can sue the president in this situation and that's the states. States do have what we call standing to enter the court because they suffer an injury."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.