Shadow Trial: Prosecutors in Ferguson violated our right to an open criminal justice system.

[csziggy]

53. I'm talking about the legal requirement of closed grand jury proceedings

I'm talking about the public need for cases like this to be out in the open so they see that justice is done.

There are cases where a closed door grand jury is needed. But a case like the Michael Brown homicide needs daylight and the public needs to know that all that can be done to arrive at that justice has been done.

That is why the comparison to the George Zimmerman case is relevant. It was open, the public could see what happened and hear the legal arguments for and against his guilt. When the verdict came down people were not happy, but they had the satisfaction that they had seen the process.

Unless there is some other legal proceeding against Darren Wilson or the Ferguson Police Department, there will never be public satisfaction. There will always be questions. And we can see from the transcripts that overt legal mistakes were made by the prosecutors - mistakes that could not have passed without challenge in an open court.

You have the same section that Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out. That Missouri law had been declared unconstitutional in 1985 but the prosecutors in the grand jury still let the jury listen to Wilson's testimony with the impression that the law was still valid. Although they later called back the law, the way it was done obviously left questions in the jurors' minds - and the prosecutors did not give the answers the jurors needed to satisfy their questions.

Either those prosecutors have a poor grasp of the law or they willfully mislead the jurors.