controversy: a few fans dropping the Rams because of the WRs's Ferguson gesture

Inter esting.

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NERam wrote:

The more I see issues like this being sliced, diced and pureed by the media and talking heads, the more I understand “Vanilla Bill” and his control of the Patriots and media interaction.

At a time when the Rams seem to be gelling on both sides of the ball, and maybe, just maybe heading for a meaningful game in late December, I sure hate seeing any kind of distraction that Fisher and the players have to deal with.

This is not meant as a political statement, BTW. Just an opinion regarding the effect on a team when a player, or players, make comments that serve as fodder for the reporters.

Perhaps Mr. Bills tight rein had some merit; If you (the players) don’t say it, I ain’t gotta contend with it.

Well, the Pats were able to do just fine
even with all that Hernandez stuff goin on
around them, so, i would think a well-coached team
of grown men, can handle some ‘distractions.’
But we’ll see.

I know Washington is gonna come out with intensity,
cause their coach basically called them out
on that recently.

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rfl wrote:

I must say, I am impressed with Cook. I had no idea he had this much articulate depth.

He’s not just reading a PR statement. He is expressing a perspective reflecting not only intelligence, but balance and nuance. He keeps a lot of issues in mind here, and appeals to the angels of our nature.

I was taken with the moment when he apparently teared up over the statement by the African American police organization. That showed a person with heart and also an African American with a powerful sense of solidarity and identity.

I have stayed out of the discussion for the most part but those who know me can imagine where I stand. What I have resonated with most strongly is the recognition, I believe articulated by Zooey, that African Americans know in their bones and long past refutation that they remain, decade after decade, vulnerable to prejudicial police harassment and violence. They have lived their lives being harassed by cops and watching people who look like them die. That shared experience is surely what our African American WRs were testifying to.

And it’s what moved Cook when hearing from African American police whose voices are silenced in all of this. Yet Cook’s response remains fully human, engaged, aware of the positive role of police in his life and profession as well.

This incident testifies to Cook being a man and a human being. We’re all human, but most people live out of touch with their core humanity. Cook is in touch with his. He sounds like a guy one would like to know.

You know, the whole matter of intelligence and its relationship to athletic skill is interesting. Players of truly limited intelligence often struggle. The best athletes often play smart, a mental shrewdness in processing the demands of the game. But these players are often pretty unintelligent in the rest of life. One remembers Billy Kilmer’s obtuse recent comments about the Redskins–not just racist but simply dumb.

Sometimes, one finds intelligence in a player that goes well beyond game-smarts. And it can actually interfere with play. Kevin Carter was a highly intelligent, cultured man. He never seemed to love football enough to fulfill his potential.

I wonder if Cook is like that. Watching him play, I have had the impression of a dull person with great athletic gifts. Based on this incident, that impression seems false. He is clearly a thoughtful, reflective guy. He seems to be one of those rare players I would actually enjoy knowing.

Now if he can just quit dropping passes …

Yeah, well said, RFL.

And Kendricks and Tavon need to stop
dropping balls too 🙂

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NERam wrote:

Right or wrong, what the Rams players did coming out of the tunnel has created more negative response against the team than the other 2 Pats incidents.

Thats all.

Well, it hasn’t played out yet.
Maybe some or most of those fans will come back.
And maybe the gesture made them new fans.
Time will tell.

For some reason i just thought of Jackie Robinson.
I bet a lot of fans quit on the Dodgers when
he took the field. In the end though,
things worked out 🙂

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wv wrote:

For some reason i just thought of Jackie Robinson.
I bet a lot of fans quit on the Dodgers when
he took the field. In the end though,
things worked out

w
v

Sooo, if I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that the Rams give up their maddening attempts at playing good, consistent football, and switch to baseball?

Not a bad idea, but the Cardinals might get a bit testy.

http://espn.go.com/espnradio/play?id=11969591
The Olberman podcast

Might be time to move this
big ole thread to the other board.
I dunno. I dont really care,
but some folks might think
its less footbally and more
politically.

Anyway, back to pure football,
and bring on the
Washington…um…R-words.

w
v

I’ve posted a few things about this… of course, it’s me, so it’s long:

****
(Responding to a concern that it would be hard to believe that the DA had a remotely prosecutable case, but just decided to shelve it) Well, yeah, that’s pretty much what happened. As I quoted in the football thread, Justice Scalia in 1992 laid out very clearly the role of the Grand Jury and the presentation of evidence.

“It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.”

I’m quoting from an article on Alternet, but there are several good articles out there on this very topic. The article goes on:

The passage was first highlighted by attorney Ian Samuel, a former clerk to Justice Scalia.

McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours and made sure the grand jury was aware of every possible piece of evidence that could exculpate the cop. In his rambling press conference Monday night, McCulloch explained that the refusal to indict resulted from the combination of contradictory eyewitness testimony and other exculpatory evidence. But it was immediately obvious to legal experts that the way the prosecutor presented the evidence virtually guaranteed that there would be no indictment, and therefore no trial. As the cliche goes, a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. But, it should be added, the prosecutor has to want the ham sandwich to be indicted. (emphasis mine)

There was so much wrong with how this went down that books will be written about it. McCulloch should have recused. He didn’t. He should have actually presented the charges to the Grand Jury. He didn’t. Not in the same manner as every OTHER Grand Jury. Normally a DA will actually present the charges and then essentially make his Prima Facie (or first facts) case as to WHY the Grand Jury should indict. It’s the whole point. His office functioned as de facto defense attorneys in the Grand Jury for Officer Wilson, a breach of the duties of his office before the Grand Jury. Other than giving the Grand Jury a list of charges, the Assistant DAs, NOT the DA himself, did NOT make any case for the return of any of the charges. As the Grand Jury was not sequestered, they KNEW they were in on the biggest case in the country and for the DA to not be presenting the case for indictment sent a STRONG signal to them that he didn’t expect an indictment. DAs are political animals and you will NEVER see a DA pass up a chance to get an indictment on a high profile case before the Grand Jury because if it goes to trial, he will want to ensure that everything before the Grand Jury is perfect. As an example, if this were going to trial, there’s NO WAY Wilson goes before the Grand Jury because the DA would want to tear into his inconsistent testimony on cross examination. Why the different distances? Why was his testimony from that day so different from the subsequent testimony a week later? How does he reconcile the testimony of the other person with Michael Brown who says Officer Wilson actually opened his car door and slammed it into Brown, which also puts everyone and the DNA in the right place, but puts Wilson on the aggressive and totally contradicts his account? NO ONE has put Wilson on a stand and cross-examined him. EVER. And now, it can’t happen. Which…was pretty much the plan all along. It had to be. There are just simply too many affirmative actions (no pun intended) taken to come to any other conclusion.

The shocking part isn’t that Officer Wilson wasn’t indicted. It was that it went to the Grand Jury at all and that they went to all the trouble of trying to cover for Officer Wilson when the outcome was predetermined. There is NO WAY after the release of that information that a discerning person can say that the DA sought justice or even the unvarnished truth.

The DAs office’s intent was to ensure that Officer Brown was NOT indicted. And they ensured that successfully.

I totally agree that any looting and burning is sad, unnecessary, counterproductive and wrong. What I appreciated were folks in the crowd wearing black hoodies with “Peacekeeper” on it in white letters and phone cameras and rather than videoing the cops, they were taking footage of the people. And whenever a crowd gathered, you’d see folks get there and try to start talking to people. Didn’t always work, but there were and are a lot of people who want to see this turn into positive change. MOST (easily 99+% of the people there throughout the months of protests) are looking to see positive changes… like community policing, body cams on police and a host of other things to make their community a better place.

One thing DA McCulloch DID say that is very true. If we want different outcomes, change the laws. Don’t burn things down. Now, with gerrymandering and all the political shenanigans all over the place, that’s a tough row to hoe, but if we as a people can deal with all we’ve changed from only white landowners participating in the political process to where we are today, we can certainly move even farther toward our founding ideals where we state that all men are created equal (and thus are treated equally under the law).
****

DA McCulloch misused the Grand Jury. Plain and simple.

As Justice Scalia points out, the Grand Jury is NOT the venue for exculpatory evidence. Moreover, Officer Wilson’s testimony was RIDDLED with inconsistencies that should have been subject to cross-examination at trial.

The purpose of the Grand Jury is NOT to convict. It’s to INDICT. And there was enough to indict. There just was.

Now… especially because Officer Wilson is a Police Officer, because the eyewitness testimony was inconclusive and because the forensics were also inconclusive and there was no video evidence, it’s pretty unlikely Officer Wilson would be convicted. At least of a higher crime like murder. Depending on what happened at trial, a REALLY good prosecutor might get him on a lower charge of a lesser manslaughter if he were able to establish better about the distances because Officer Wilson’s testimony didn’t match the forensic evidence…EITHER. That part gets glossed over by his defenders.

I’m not arguing that Officer Wilson is guilty…or innocent.

I’m not arguing that Michael Brown is guilty of anything since he’s not on trial (and he shouldn’t be PUT on trial in some BS equivocation nonsense).

I’m arguing that the Grand Jury process was subverted and, thus that justice was denied.

You don’t seem to argue that fact, but seem to rationalize it.

I wholeheartedly, to the marrow of my bones, respectfully disagree. The law is the law and we should follow it for all.

Officer Wilson was denied his day in court by this and thus was denied justice as well. Not to the degree that the Brown family was, obviously, as they lost a son. My point is that in subverting the Grand Jury process for a political outcome, justice was DENIED to all involved.

And anyone pointing to the Grand Jury process in this case as a vindicatory process simply doesn’t understand what happened.
****

(regarding the contention that the evidence dump was rigging the process)
the accusation that giving the jury all the evidence is the VERY DEFINITION of rigging it.

I’m sorry if you don’t understand that.

It is NOT, absolutely NOT the job of the Grand Jury to adjudicate the merits of guilt or innocence or to exonerate a person.

I’ve posted probably half a dozen times the standard articulated by Justice Scalia. That is NOT what McCulloch did. Moreover, what McCulloch did isn’t just kinda, sorta outside the norm. It’s SO UNUSUAL that it borders on the “unheard of” and people struggled to find precedent for it…anywhere.

Further, your statement that “it means there was no evidence of a crime” is just not correct. We don’t know that because the DA never ASKED the Grand Jury for an indictment. They put the Grand Jury in a very difficult position, a position that no trial jury is in because evidence there has the benefit of scrutiny by opposing counsel. They were asked to “figure it out” when the DA essentially created reasonable doubt by presenting all of the exculpatory evidence.

And let me be clear here. The ONLY evidence the DA SHOULD have presented was that evidence necessary to obtain an indictment. The DA before the Grand Jury functions in a prosecutorial role. Many veteran prosecutors have come forward (and they tend to lean pretty conservative) and said that they’ve never seen or heard of a DA or their office NOT presenting a case, only presenting the evidence AND presenting exculpatory evidence before the Grand Jury.

So, the only evidence the Grand Jury should have seen were those pieces of evidence that supported the charges AND THAT’S IT.

That’s the function of the Grand Jury. They perform a preliminary function in the judicial process.

It’s not exactly basic civics, but we can’t conflate juries.

And what DA McCulloch did sets a potentially disastrous precedent for DAs around the country to pawn off cases where they don’t want to indict onto the Grand Jury and then subvert the Grand Jury with these tactics.

It’s just really, really bad from a process standpoint. The Grand Jury is really important for a lot of reasons and its misuse by prosecutors should be heavily scrutinized and sanctioned.
****
I wanna say one thing.

The Grand Jury not indicting Officer Wilson does NOT mean he was innocent or guilty.

The Grand Jury not indicting Officer Wilson also does NOT mean that Michael Brown was guilty of anything (he was never on trial. Remember… he was the victim and he’s a dead human being).

What it means is that the Grand Jury returned No True bills on the charges presented.

I’ve read several people post things like “the evidence exonerates Officer Wilson” and stuff like that.

Well, no, it doesn’t. While there was a LOT of evidence, much of it including Officer Wilson’s testimony was NOT subject to Cross Examination nor secondary examination AND much of it was contradictory. All the more reason it should have gone to trial, really.

My point is that there was still a lot of work left to do and that SHOULD have been done at trial. Just the fact that Officer Wilson’s testimony was so grossly inconsistent from his initial statements to his later statements and how the distances didn’t match should have been enough to indict considering that enough distance would have put his other testimony in question.

But, basically, that’s it. The Grand Jury coming back didn’t “acquit” or “exonerate” Officer Wilson.

It may have exposed a very flawed, biased system and it certainly exposed a misuse of the Grand Jury by DA McCulluch (as defined by Justice Scalia), but all the Grand Jury finding did is say that the process wouldn’t continue. It didn’t express innocence or a lack of guilt.

Of anyone.

In talking to a cousin who is an attorney, it’s obvious to me that the prosecuting attorney didn’t do his job. His job, if he takes the case to a grand jury, is to do whatever he can to get an indictment. In this case, because Wilson’s a police officer, McCulloch did not do his job … his office basically acted as Wilson’s defense. I have no problem with the grand jury’s decision based on the evidence presented, but in any other type of case (that doesn’t involve a police officer as defendant) his office wouldn’t have presented evidence that helped the defendant. McCulloch went this route to avoid his responsibility and avoid public backlash. If he didn’t think there was enough evidence to charge Wilson, he should have never presented the case to the grand jury. But, that would have meant he would have had to take the heat.

Actually, Cal, while I’m HARDLY a Scalia fan, he’s absolutely RIGHT about the function of the Grand Jury.

It has a function. If you’ve ever seen the movie, My Cousin Vinny (which, like all movies in a legal setting, get aspects of the law incorrect), the inexperienced lawyer Vinny has to appear before the judge at the Arraignment. However, because Vinny understands the law, but not the procedures of the court, he struggles so mightily that he gets himself thrown in jail because he cannot fathom that the arraignment is simply and ONLY the act of entering a plea. That’s it.

Well, the Grand Jury has a specific function.

It is not and never has been about innocence or guilt and that’s why exculpatory evidence is not required.

The Grand Jury is the check on a prosecutor’s power so that a DA can’t just bring ANY charge against ANYONE, ANY time he/she feels like it. So, for major crimes, the DA or AG must go before the Grand Jury and present that prima facie evidence to at least establish that there is at least enough to CHARGE the person. NOT convict. Just to charge.

That is why McCulloch so misused this process. Well, it was two-fold. Firstly, he gave them all the evidence WITHOUT the benefit of rigorous cross examination. Trial juries at least have the adversarial process of the trial in which both sides CONTEST the evidence and THEN they can sort out the evidence. The Grand Jury in the Wilson case didn’t have that. They had the raw evidence and were forced in many cases to accept suspect evidence as is and then make a judgment based on that. If a person receives a proper defense, the trial jury isn’t put through that.

Secondly, DA McCulloch did NOT provide the narrative of WHY the evidence supported the charges. He stated himself that he gave the evidence to the Grand Jury and let them come to their own conclusion and EVEN IN cases where Grand Juries are investigative (like RICO cases), the DA or AG still goes to often great lengths to explain how the evidence supports the charges expressly in order to get indictments.

The very common misunderstanding in this case is that what DA McCulloch did is reasonable.

It not only isn’t reasonable, it’s unconscionable, unethical and sets a potentially disastrous legal precedent for high profile cases. Worse, it preys on the common ignorance of the legal system. DA McCulloch knows full damn well that if Michael Brown had killed Officer Wilson and claimed self-defense, even if there were video directly exonerating him, IT STILL WOULD HAVE GONE TO TRIAL. And the words he would have used were, “it’s important for this to run its course through the legal process”.

Now, if DA McCulloch simply didn’t want to charge Office Wilson, that was always at his discretion. He could have simply refused to charge him. Heck, he could have properly used the Grand Jury, GOT an indictment AND STILL not charged him. That’s happened before, too. Getting an indictment doesn’t automatically mean that the DA must file those charges.

But what DA McCulloch did was wrong on a lot of levels. Unfortunately, because they are procedural, it’s even easier for those who are on Team Wilson (not saying you, just saying those that clearly ARE on Team Wilson) to create tons and tons of obfuscation about how getting it so wrong is OKAY… because the outcome is what they wanted.

It’s really no different than Pats fans being okay with the Spygate cheating because they got 3 Lombardis from it.

wv wrote:

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/11978096/after-ferguson-sports-stars-waking-up

The “anti-jordans”

Howard Bryant

This story appears in ESPN The Magazine’s Dec. 22 Interview Issue. Subscribe today!

AFTER THE BLOOD AND FIRE of Ferguson, the video of a killing in New York that went unpunished and a 12-year-old shot dead in Cleveland, a wave of protest is rapidly defining America, awakening athletes once considered too busy with their stock portfolios to notice much of anything. It isn’t just the St. Louis Five, the Rams players united in the wake of the Ferguson non-indictment, but also Saints tight end Ben Watson speaking out on Facebook. It’s Pacers forward David West on Twitter, more invested in the black lives that fall at the hands of the police than in how his words might risk his brand. It is LeBron James and the Heat in hoodies after Trayvon Martin’s death last year, and Kobe Bryant this year indicting not Michael Brown nor Darren Wilson but an entire broken system of justice that in many ways created both of them.

The awakening represents the arrival of the anti-Jordans, the athlete as a living, breathing, thinking citizen and not just a sneaker pitchman. If the aftermath of September 11 politicized the ballfield by valorizing American militarism, athletes after the non-indictments in Ferguson and New York now reject the public demand of shut up and play. They see that America, divided by race and class, could not be less “post-racial,” a term intended to bury yesterday and soften tomorrow. It is an awakening in which some black athletes see no reward for being dutiful front men, for saluting the police as heroes at halftime; they instead see themselves reduced to a pre-racial place, no more American or human for their loyalty, so convinced that black lives don’t matter that they’ve joined the national movement demanding that they do.

These anti-Jordans know their enormous sums of money can shield their children from attending a broken public school system or from living in a neighborhood with no services, no self-determination and no hope. But they also know they cannot shield their friends, their aunts and uncles, from those same realities, and they cannot be sure that following all the rules will keep their loved ones from being shot by police. Money cannot shield players from their own consciences, or from the video of a New York policeman killing Eric Garner with a choke hold. Players’ silence has kept them tethered to systems they now find they must protest. Violence has shattered the post-racial myth and finally ended the silence.

Rams receiver Kenny Britt’s message on his taped wrists-“Mike Brown” on the right, “My Kids Matter” on the left-directly challenged that tethering, a severing of those ties. The patronizing aftermath-the St. Louis Police Officers Association demanded the NFL discipline Britt and his teammates-validated Britt’s voice, the massive overreaction connecting protected black players to the abandoned black poor.

The racial divide in this country is most powerfully demonstrated by white America’s ironclad belief in a legal system that black America views as hopelessly, oppressively broken. Ferguson flayed open the division. For African-Americans, race is personal, all day, every day, legally and emotionally the defining characteristic of our American existence. For whites, race is often but a topic, one to be debated and engaged or dismissed as whining and tabled for another day. It is a gap that cannot be bridged by flimsily blaming hip-hop culture or demanding that blacks need to be more responsible, for black responsibility is inseparable from blockbusting, redlining, and the other government and cultural forces that created the debilitating conditions in the first place.

The current awakening confronts the intersection of race and power, but if players successfully challenged power by toppling Donald Sterling, and if they now feel emboldened to protest police brutality, domestic violence is a reminder that the activist male player should not get too comfortable. Men must now confront another power, and that power is themselves. The next awakening will be in discovering just how many of these dots players choose to connect, for the trinity of class, race and gender is inseparable. The masculinity system, like the justice system and the racist and classist elements that fuel today’s protests, now requires reform. Players’ actions will tell us whether they are more than just a commercial. If so, maybe their awakening will be complete.
===================

Well put, I think.

SNL skit apparently got cut from the show for some reason. Time, I think.

Anyway, it’s amusing without being inflammatory or taking sides.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/08/snl-ferguson-cut-sketch_n_6288448.html