11-26-2014, 01:37 PM
(11-25-2014, 08:51 PM)Duchess Wrote: I still can't get over the way they waited until 9:00 PM to release the information. I want to know why but that probably won't be forthcoming. Surely daylight hours would have been better.
You've gotten me really curious as to the rationale behind announcing the grand jury decision at night. I heard local news commentators speculating that it was possibly to avoid disruption to traffic and school transport, but that doesn't make much sense since there was such insufficient security in place for a planned night time announcement.
McCulloch needs to answer that question directly, IMO. Here's some speculation by a law school professor (Armour) that's in line with possibilities that crossed my mind when you posed the criticism and questions about the timing upthread.
Snip:
St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s late-night unveiling of the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown fatal shooting has drawn criticism from legal experts who said the timing was to blame for the chaos that immediately erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, including the torching of two police cars and looting. McCulloch, whose controversial handling of the Darren Wilson case has been heavily scrutinized in recent months, held an 8 p.m. news conference Monday to announce Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson was not being indicted.
McCulloch only had to look to previous rowdy protests in the days shortly after Brown was shot and killed in August to know that a daytime grand jury announcement was a better option, according to Jody David Armour, a professor at the University of Southern California Law School in Los Angeles. During the day, protests in and around Ferguson were peaceful, with more unruly activity happening at night.
Only McCulloch knows why the go-ahead was given for the 8 p.m. grand jury announcement -- authorities have yet to explain the rationale behind it. But Armour speculated that the St. Louis County prosecutor in part had his own self interests in mind.
“This was more about stagecraft, building drama, building suspense so that he can grandstand. He can bask in kind of the public eye and the media attention and be the focal point in a way that you can’t perhaps at other times in the day,” Armour said. “It was abundantly foreseeable that there would be, could be more trouble at night and those additional risks were deemed worth it for whatever other interests he was serving in having a late announcement.”
Another reason may have been that government officials intentionally wanted to make protesters appear less sympathetic by using the cover of darkness, critics said. “They’ll look more menacing at night,” Armour said. “There’s more fear naturally that everyone feels when it’s dark and you’re groping around in the dark. It seems that if you wanted to construct a scenario to cast the protesters in the worst possible light, you would do what Bob McCulloch did in this case.”
Full story: http://www.ibtimes.com/ferguson-grand-ju...ht-1729192