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Friday, December 12, 2014

If This Isn't Suborning Perjury, It's Still a Violation of Legal Ethics

One of the things that prosecutors are not supposed to do is to encourage a witness to lie. It's called suborning perjury, and it is a crime.

On a marginally lower level of corruption and malfeasance is knowingly putting a witness on the stand who you know will lie.

In what is surprisingly unsurprising news, it turns out that the St. Louis prosecutors office called a witness to testify in the Michael Brown killing who they knew to be lying:
So, you are Prosecutor Bob McCulloch. You have a grand jury investigation with the entire world watching. One of your witnesses in support of the officer is revealed by the FBI to have made up her entire account. What do you do?

Apparently you present a discredited witness to the grand jury anyways. He played the FBI interview, which revealed that Witness 40’s car was not at the location, that 40 could not have exited in the manner described, that 40 did not even tell anyone her story until over two weeks after the shooting. They tore her apart, showing that she changed her story several times while sitting on the stand. For example, in her interview, 40 claimed to have made no contact to the police for two weeks, then later claimed that she did contact them several times before agreeing to be a witness. And that is not the only occasion they caught her changing her story, with other times her lack of knowledge of the crime scene, how her journal and testimony did not match, how the exit for the complex did not exist where she claimed all being revealed. That interview, found on pages 86-184 of Grand Jury Testimony Volume 15, completely discredits her as a witness.

Then, fully knowing this, Bob McCulloch brought her before the grand jury, and entered her hand written journals filled with racist language into the record. And this testimony, by a discredited witness, is the one cited by right-wing media outlets in their attempts to support former Ferguson officer Darren Wilson. Claims of Michael Brown charging like a bull? Her account, and only her account.
 Seriously, why does Bob McCulloch still have a law license?

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