03-23-2022, 06:37 PM
At the risk of getting involved in this contentious thread:
1. I interpreted Burger's comments as being directed at Crimson, and I thought they were patently unfair.
2. I believe the women in these cases (or at least the vast majority of them) and I bet there are other women who haven't even come forward.
3. What does being a Stanford alum have to do with anything? There's no evidence of moral superiority by alumni I don't think.
4. It's factually incorrect to state that there are "loads of cases" where grand juries fail to indict obviously guilty defendants. At the state level the rate of indictment is estimated to be 95%+ and at the federal level it's even higher. There was a study done about a decade ago by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that concluded that out of 160,000 cases pursued by federal prosecutors, only eleven (11) didn't make it to trial because a grand jury didn't return an indictment. The fact that this grand jury issued a No Bill in all nine cases presented is unusual and can't be casually dismissed. Whether prosecutors framed the case in a certain manner because they weren't confident of ultimately meeting the standard of guilt at trial or they couldn't meet the lower standard for indictment at the grand jury level equals the same result. Watson surely seems guilty on a moral (and possibly civil) level but at the criminal level for him to have prevailed in front of the grand jury is not meaningless.
1. I interpreted Burger's comments as being directed at Crimson, and I thought they were patently unfair.
2. I believe the women in these cases (or at least the vast majority of them) and I bet there are other women who haven't even come forward.
3. What does being a Stanford alum have to do with anything? There's no evidence of moral superiority by alumni I don't think.
4. It's factually incorrect to state that there are "loads of cases" where grand juries fail to indict obviously guilty defendants. At the state level the rate of indictment is estimated to be 95%+ and at the federal level it's even higher. There was a study done about a decade ago by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that concluded that out of 160,000 cases pursued by federal prosecutors, only eleven (11) didn't make it to trial because a grand jury didn't return an indictment. The fact that this grand jury issued a No Bill in all nine cases presented is unusual and can't be casually dismissed. Whether prosecutors framed the case in a certain manner because they weren't confident of ultimately meeting the standard of guilt at trial or they couldn't meet the lower standard for indictment at the grand jury level equals the same result. Watson surely seems guilty on a moral (and possibly civil) level but at the criminal level for him to have prevailed in front of the grand jury is not meaningless.