Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy says that under different circumstances, the question of whether to press charges in the Michael Brown shooting would have been decided by the district attorney in Ferguson, Missouri.
"In a normal case, it would not have been brought to the grand jury," McCarthy said Wednesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
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"Because the prosecutor usually makes a judgment call about a case and those cases that you don't think you can win at trial, where the standard is beyond the reasonable doubt, which is higher than what the grand jury needs to find.
"If you don't think you can win a trial, you don't bring that case to the grand jury in the first place."
McCarthy — author of
"Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment," published by Encounter Books — said the prosecutor in Ferguson "probably did not want to be unilaterally on the hook" for making a decision he knew would be very controversial.
"So, by doing this grand jury, he really essentially dumped the decision in the lap of the community," McCarthy said.
"The grand jury is the community's representative, as the framers intended in our Constitution and in most state constitutions between the possibility of an overzealous prosecutor and an individual American citizen presumed innocent. That's what the grand jury is there for."
Brown, an 18-year-old black man, was shot dead by police officer Darren Wilson, who is white, during a confrontation — an event that sparked weeks of racial unrest in the predominantly African-American St. Louis suburb.
McCarthy — a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who prosecuted the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 — is now a columnist at National Review.
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