It’s been over two months since that afternoon in June when – depending on who you believe – either:<\/p>\n
You recall the situation (and if you don’t, here’s a partial list of my coverage<\/a>); the citizen, Martin Treptow, an out-of-work security guard with a legal carry permit, was taken into custody (absolutely normal in these situations, even if there’s not a cop involved) – and then promptly released without charge, and without his carry permit even being suspended (absolutely abnormal <\/em>in these situations).<\/p>\n And since then…silence.\u00a0 Nothing.\u00a0 Zilch.\u00a0 Indeed, as Joel Rosenberg and Andrew Rothman noted<\/a> in Joel’s blog and in a couple of appearances on the NARN, less than nothing<\/em>; the official silence has the appearance of a coverup, amid allegations (from sources with knowlege of the case and of the officer involved) that the cop behaved very <\/em>improperly.\u00a0<\/p>\n Joel has the latest<\/a> – and while it doesn’t read like a lot is happening, read closely:<\/p>\n [Anoka County Attorney] Robert M. A. Johnson<\/a>…has empaneled a grand jury in the Treptow case<\/a>.<\/p>\n What will be a secret — and is unlikely to leak directly — is what exactly will happen inside the grand jury room; by law, such proceedings are secret, and leak only sometimes.<\/p>\n That said, there are some things that are clear at this point:<\/p>\n 1. There’s no legal need for a grand jury. If Johnson wanted to indict somebody in this, he could do it without a grand jury.<\/p>\n 2. There may be a political use for a grand jury. Prosecutors can use grand juries to investigate complex cases — and this one isn’t that. The investigation was complete within days of the incident; all the witnesses that the Coon Rapids\/Anoka authorities wanted to interview, and who were cooperative, had talked to the cops within hours, or a very few days, of the attack.<\/p>\n But a prosecutor can use a grand jury to indict a politically-difficult-to-indict defendant, or as an excuse for not indicting anybody. There’s an old saying: a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As Joel points out, Johnson is not politically vulnerable.\u00a0 So the question is, which potential indictment is the political hot-potato?\u00a0 Treptow, or “Officer Friendly”?<\/p>\n I am not a lawyer, but I strongly suspect that if Treptow were remotely vulnerable to being charged under the circumstances, he’d have been charged long ago.\u00a0 Self-defense shooting is a tricky legal tightrope, with more legal pitfalls than dating LaToya Jackson; if someone’s going to screw up, it’s probably (I suspect) going to be obvious enough that a “hereditary” (see Joel’s explanation) county attorney isn’t going to worry about losing political capital.<\/p>\n But indicting a cop?\u00a0<\/p>\n Hm.<\/p>\n Joel continues (and I add emphasis):<\/p>\n A prosecutor can also carefully not present enough evidence to persuade a grand jury to indict anybody, and use that as an excuse — say, if the defendant is a public employee whose indictment would be politically embarrassing.<\/strong> “Hey; it wasn’t my fault. The grand jury refused to do anything.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Finally: \u00a0<\/p>\n It’s not quite a guarantee, but it’s a very safe bet that Martin Treptow won’t be indicted. I wouldn’t be utterly surprised, though, if Rebecca Treptow was called in front of the grand jury — that would be, as far as I know, the first time that anybody involved in law enforcement would have so much as made any effort whatsoever to interview her since June 7.<\/p>\n (Yup, you read that right: the highly professional law enforcement professionals of the Coon Rapids PD, the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office, and the Anoka County Attorney’s office made, as far as I know, no attempt whatsoever to interview the key witness in more than two months of their “investigation.”\u00a0 They certainly made no attempt to talk to her within the first month.\u00a0 Gee, I wonder why . . . .)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read the whole thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n CORRECTION:\u00a0 Afternoon, not evening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been over two months since that afternoon in June when – depending on who you believe – either: an irresponsible citizen who should never have been given a carry permit (under a law that should never have passed!) freaked out and shot a mild-mannered undercover cop who may have been acting a bit aggressively, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[216],"class_list":["post-1196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-victim-disarmament","tag-treptow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1196"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27403,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions\/27403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}