But her statement isn’t enough to convince some in Memphis. Josh Spickler, the executive director of Just City, a group advocating for criminal justice reform in Memphis, said it is rare that such a case wouldn’t get an
will be enforced. The CLERB ordinance passed in council with a 9-2 vote, with only councilmen Reid Hedgepeth and Kemp Conrad voting against it. Conrad said he didn’t have a problem with the idea of CLERB, but he felt that the group pushing for the changes — Memphis United — was anti-police. Memphis United has organized peaceful protests against police violence and supports the Black Lives Matter movement. “I and others were concerned that the CLERB board allowed these openly anti-police people to hijack the whole communications process,” Conrad said. “What if those people have influence or end up on the [CLERB] board?” But White said it’s never been the goal of CLERB to “bash police officers.” He said, in some cases where the board finds proof of police misconduct, they’ll suggest more training or a desk position over termination. “The majority of the time, when we have investigated cases [on the old board], the citizens were found at fault. Often, things happen because citizens were ignorant of the law,” White said. “We’re going to educate citizens on what their rights are and what rights they do not have. “Many times, when [police] are doing their jobs, they don’t know if a traffic stop will be their last action on this earth. We’re not just there to get the police. Most police are men and women who love our community, and some of them might be bad apples, just like you’ve got in every occupation.”
by prosecutors, though Weirich has said case officers, not prosecutors in her office, work with grand juries. No judge oversees the proceedings, and lawyers for those under investigation play no role in the hearings, according to the ABA, “meaning that the grand jury makes its findings without hearing both sides of the case.” “Today some legal observers fear that grand juries have become simply a tool of prosecutors and that grand jurors have lost their independence,” reads an ABA statement. Spickler said the Shelby County grand jury system indicts a “disproportionately high percentage” of AfricanAmerican men and that “99.9 percent” of the people grand juries do indict here are not police officers. “It’s just too much,” he said. “It’s just too much to accept that the grand jury system worked [in the Stewart case].”
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“It’s a whole lot to ask of us to accept that a white police officer, who [Weirich] wanted to indict, was not indicted and that you’ve done the best you can do.” — Josh Spickler
indictment, “especially when it’s a case that’s strong enough for the top elected law enforcement official in the county to ask for a particular charge.” “It’s a whole lot to ask of us to accept that a white police officer, who [Weirich] wanted to indict, was not indicted and that you’ve done the best you can do,” Spickler said. He called getting a grand jury indictment “routine,” and even Weirich’s handout noted grand jurors return more than 10,000 indictments a year “ranging from shoplifting to first-degree murder.” For years, legal groups, including the American Bar Association (ABA) and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, have pushed for reform of the grand jury system. The ABA notes that grand juries are closely guided
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sheet that called the system “one of the most important, yet least understood aspects of the criminal justice system.” When pressed by reporters, Weirich stressed the fact that she wanted the indictment but that the grand jury is an independent body: “They don’t work for me. They don’t work for the D.A.’s office. They are selected from the community.”
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