Police misconduct.

Food for thought. I spent the weekend with my family and the question of Michael Brown came up. As the only lawyer in the group, several people asked me what I thought. I have posted elsewhere that I thought the Grand Jury did a good job over going over the record and making a decision. I have also posted that I do not think the DA had a conflict of interest as we understand it within the Rules of Professional Conduct.

However, Michael Bell, a retired USAF Lt. Colonel writing in Politico raises a very good point about police and prosecutors investigating themselves. Wisconsin has a law, thanks in part to Michael Bell, that calls for an outside investigation of police shootings. Lance the intern wrote at Justice4Nifong about his concerns about the prosecutor's perceived conflict of interest. While I still think the prosecutor had no conflict as it is recognized by the Rules of Professional Conduct. Lance and Michael Bell have very good points. What we really need, not just if Ferguson, but in the country as a whole is a system of holding police accountable. At the very least that means we need an independent review of police involved shootings.

I would go farther though. The Duke lacrosse fiasco shows the need for an effective system of outside review of police actions. In the fiasco, the State Bar of North Carolina provided an outside review of Nifong's disreputable prosecution. But, there was nothing like that for the Durham Police Department. The innocent men wrongly accused filed a civil lawsuit seeking an outside overseer for the DPD. The city fought that notion tooth and nail, ultimately prevailing on procedural grounds. In NC, we have been the victim of too many cases of police and prosecutorial malfeasance. Allen Gell, Darryl Hunt and Eric Daniels come to mind immediately. But, there sadly others. An outside review board in these cases would have saved us a lot of grief. These cases have cost taxpayers around NC millions of dollars that could have been put to productive use. If prosecutors and police knew that they were accountable, we would not have had to put up with these fiascoes. Nor would the innocent men involved had to be charged, and in some cases imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. Yet in no case has any police officer been disciplined. Not one!

I do not think that good police officers would oppose such a board. They want to do a good job. Good police officers do not want to be sullied by false prosecutions. Most of all, they do not want to be associated with unaccountable killers.

I do not know that an independent review of the Brown case would have reached a different outcome. As I wrote earlier, the Grand Jury did a thorough job and it looks like a good "No Bill" was returned. However, if the Ferguson Police knew that every police shooting would be referred to an ouside agency and the department as well as the officer would be subject to accountability, perhaps Officer Wilson would have not shot in the first place.

Walt-in-Durham