The law teacher in me decided to see what had to happen for criminal charges to be filed in Minnesota. I had a pretty good idea, but wanted to confirm the bar that had to be crossed to file charges. Here's what was said on a Minnesota criminal defense attorney's site:
Thanks to the following site for providing the info:
https://gallagherdefense.com/court-process/criminal-charges-mn/ _______________________________________________ A police investigation should be independent and complete before prosecutors make a charging decision. After police complete their investigation, they clear their case, wrap it up; they then may deliver documentation of their investigation to prosecutors. Then an experienced prosecutor reviews case investigation files received from police, and begins their review in consideration of criminal charges. The word “charge” means an unproven claim. Prosecutors charge a crime when they believe, given their second-hand information, they have “probable cause” that a person committed a crime. _________________________________________________
Analysis: The first thing worthy of analysis is the totality of the police investigation before it is sent to a DA for prosecution. The conflict of interest of an officer committing the crime is obvious, so it makes me wonder what sort of investigation was done and what sort of documentation was presented to the DA. The caveat of course is the obvious observation that police do get different treatment when it comes to them being charged.
The second, and most important is that the burden of proof to FILE charges is way lower than that of a courtroom. "Probable cause" is a far cry from "beyond a reasonable doubt". The video alone is enough to file charges in conjunction with the reason that the police were originally called for.
Even taking the case to a grand jury means that you clear a minimal threshold and don't even have to present your case in full to get the grand jury to send it to a trial. Long story story short, it's utter bull s**t that charges were not filed yet by the DA office. If you want to play the "well, everyone is innocent until proven guilty" card to exonerate the officers, feel free to use the above to blow their argument out of the water. Innocent until proven guilty is more for the courtroom than for the filing of charges.
Personally, I think that charges eventually will be filed in this case, and then things will get really interesting as once charges are filed the percentage of cases that get sent to trial from a grand jury are very high due to the much lower burden of proof. Of course the grand jury in the Michael Brown case passed on filing charges against the officer who shot him. With that in mind, I can see the DA sending the case to the grand jury and then it gets rejected there.
Comments