News from Missouri.
ST. LOUIS — A St. Louis grand jury on Tuesday handed down indictments against Mark and Patricia McCloskey, charged in July with brandishing weapons at protesters outside the couple’s Portland Place mansion.
The couple was indicted on felony charges of unlawful use of a weapon and evidence tampering. The indictments were filed under seal Tuesday. St. Louis Circuit Clerk Thomas Kloeppinger said a judge ordered the indictments suppressed but Kloeppinger didn’t know the reason.
The grand jury added a count of evidence tampering after the Circuit Attorney’s Office in July charged the McCloskeys each with one count of unlawful use of a weapon — exhibiting.
The McCloskeys’ lawyer Joel Schwartz said he didn’t know specifics about the charges but said he’s not surprised a grand jury indicted his clients.
“I’ll certainly be interested in what was presented to the grand jury,” said Schwartz, who plans to request a transcript or recording of the proceedings, if such records were made.
And there you have it. Done in secret, without defense, and evidence only presented by prosecutors.
After seeing the pictures of what happened, anyone with half a brain cell would have been able to entirely dismiss this whole issue.
But no. They found enough ignorant rubes to go along with their scheming.
We had this conversation before about grand juries. Grand juries have their defenders. Great and glorious thing, they are, with good, street smart, common sense folks on the juries, it was said. And I said this.
Most of America cannot do basic arithmetic, or basic physics, much less solve algebraic expressions, or … God forbid … do calculus. Most of America cannot construct coherent sentences and have no more than 2 to 3 minute attention spans.
Most Americans cannot name the first three presidents or explain the roles of the three branches of government. More than half of America voted for a corrupt communist named Hillary Clinton in the last election.
There may be some juries who happen to get it right, but in the main, I distrust juries (criminal and civil) as much as I distrust the Grand Jury. And no, your umpteen experiences with a jury don’t matter one little whit to me.
One example should suffice (I could give many more). A former colleague (and fellow professional engineer) was interviewed by lawyers to sit on a jury for a case involving elevators (who knows, maybe someone was suing Otis Elevator for whiplash or something).
The lawyer asked him, “Do you believe elevators can fall for no reason at all? To which he responded, “No, there will be a reason – mechanical failure of a component, failure of a circuit, or failure of something to cause the event. A formal root cause analysis could identify why, and give us a root cause or multiple root causes, but no, nothing happens for no reason.”
He was dismissed, and the lawyers went on until they found an entire jury who believed that elevators can fall for no apparent reason.
Grand juries … pfft.
And to their defenders because of the trustworthy, ordinary, common sense street smart folks on grand juries.
Pfft.
Ignorant rubes. Suckers. Tools.
