There Is No Relief

There is no relief
No solace in the system
When trust is broken
Right or wrong we all have lost
By virtue of this verdict
A public trial
Witnesses in open court
Would this have been wrong
Perhaps, but we’ll never know
Case closed…

~~ Dominic R. DiFrancesco ~~

16 thoughts on “There Is No Relief

  1. Dom, there is so much misinformation on this issue. The most egregious is coming from the Brown family lawyer–with Al Sharpton nodding in agreement. Grand jury deliberations are different from criminal trials. Their responsibility is to determine if there is sufficient evidence to bind the accused over for trial. Any lawyer would know this. Their agenda has to be kept on the front burner.

    There are no “dream team” defense lawyers present during grand jury deliberations. How many have poured through the 4700 pages of deliberations before speaking? I can never know what it feels like to be an African American and profiled because of my race. I do know what it feels like to be intimidated, threatened at gunpoint; to be robbed; to have a bullet whistle past my head; to be refused access; to have large rocks thrown at my vehicle–just because, I was a white person working in a predominately black area.

    • Thank you for the thoughtful comment my friend, I really do appreciate it. I am aware that the grand jury is much different than a public criminal trial and I certainly am no lawyer, but it does appear even in the prosecutors own words, that he tried to remain neutral. As I understand it, whether this a grand jury or a criminal trial, the prosecutor (by definition) should not be neutral, that is not his job. Just by virtual of being neutral he is likely leading the grand jury toward a verdict of “no indictment”. Also, with his history (his father a police officer killed on the job) he is very likely to tainted and therefore should have recused himself from the process. This being said, indicting the officer so that all facts in the case could be presented at a public trial would have gone a long way toward transparency in this case. In the end this didn’t happen and never will. I too can’t ever hope to know what it feels like to be African American in the U.S., but we would be blind to think that racism does not exist against them. I’m certain we could find a far greater number of cases of discrimination against our African American citizens that we ever could against whites. I just find it a true shame that any of this still occurs in the 21st century and I firmly believe that “deadly” for did not need to be used. It has been a very long time since I have seen a police office that does not carry a taser in addition to his firearm. Perhaps tasing an unarmed man would have been a better option than shooting him 6 times and killing him. Of course this is just one mans opinion. Enough of my rant, I hope that you and yours have a very Happy Thanksgiving.

  2. Thanks for your reply and Happy Thanksgiving! I agree with your points on discrimination. I knew the risks of working in the inner city. I respect your opinion on Bob McCullough, even though I don’t completely agree. His father’s murder, could have been a hindrance, or could have strengthened his resolve–I can’t say for sure. Was there a history of discriminatory actions in the past? I don’t know. I’ve been gone from the St. Louis area for ten years. It bothers me that some responses have gone far afield from Dr. King’s principles of non-violence. Violence always begets violence.

    • I do agree with you with regards to violence and I don’t particularly know the St. Louis area very well as I am from New Jersey, but I’m certain that discrimination is discrimination and violence is violence now matter where we are from. I guess we can never really know what is in another man’s mind so all we can do is speculate. Be well my friend, it has been a pleasure to have this discussion with you.

  3. Thank you, dear Dom for putting it so succinctly and poetically! This is not over for any of us. It’s the tip of a very large iceberg that I fear we are choosing to try and save rather than let it die. Unfortunately, along with the death of the iceberg of oppression some precious human life will be lost also. We can always depend upon you to get to the heart of the situation. I hope you and yours enjoyed your Thanksgiving!!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.