The sad spectacle of the Ferguson grand jury's long, execrable march towards the inevitable no true bill vote is over. Details of the Michael Brown shooting aside, it has long been clear that whatever the outcome had been, there would be anger, bitterness, and little in the way of dialogue or introspection.
This is the sad state of race relations in this country; the inability of too many white people to acknowledge that race still matters greatly, far more greatly than these folks imagine, the refusal to engage in real discussions about this uncomfortable subject, and the resulting sense that justice was not served in Ferguson and that it may have been unrealistic to think it could it have been.
On a more concrete level, the end result was exactly what the prosecution intended. That Ferguson's chief prosecutor Robert McCulloch's office did not affirmatively ask the grand jury to indict at the close of the presentation says all one needs to know. In sum, prosecutors can virtually always indict anyone they choose, and here, they chose not to, and did so in a way that enables the powers that be in Ferguson to both shift responsibility to the anonymous grand jury, while offering up "objective" arguments as to Wilson's lack of criminal responsibility. Whether Wilson could have been successfully prosecuted or why McCulloch brought about the no true bill vote are open questions. That the grand jury's vote was the result of a calculated effort by the prosecution to avoid an indictment is beyond argument.
