DA and His Grand Jury: Santa Clara County's Legal "Cosa Nostra"

In the US academic tradition, Franz Kafka's 1925 novel "The Trial" (about an office clerk that's trapped in a senseless judicial process after he's arrested for an unspecified crime) is held up alongside Orwell's "1984" as the ultimate nightmare of totalitarian injustice. But compared to the routine experience of communities targeted by today's US police state, Kafka's grim tale is like a sunny day in Disneyland. Now we see the order of Kafka's nightmare reversed, and the victim is first executed. After the killing, the grieving family is then trapped in a senseless judicial process in which the executed victim seems to be tried for an unspecified crime (and already found to be guilty), and sentenced to a punishment of death by execution (which has already been carried out).

Welcome to the secret world of Santa Clara County "officer-involved shootings", where prosecutors are free to posthumously transform any person's existence into one that was destined to be ended by a police bullet. District Attorney George Kennedy calls this world "MY grand jury thing" (see http://www.cfac.org/Attachments/santa_clara_police_request.htm), presumably using MY thing in the same sense as a certain group of Sicilians, who call their pursuits Our Thing or, in Italian, Cosa Nostra. In the view of the DA's office, the public occasionally misunderstands this world, and gets the crazy idea that it should be the killer on trial, not the victim. At such times, the public must be corrected. Mass correction is handled by the mass media, while individual correction is the job of the County's Department of Correction.

This time it's the case of Samuel Martinez, an unarmed father of three children aged 6-17, who was shot dead by SJPD member Patrick Guire on May 26. First, Assistant DA Dave Tomkins explained to us that DA Kennedy's "grand jury thing" must be kept secret because “the facts surrounding Mr. Martinez's death do not warrant an open grand jury”. Of course, we don't know what "the facts” are because, in this convoluted lunacy, "the facts" used to justify secrecy are secret too.

Next, members of Mr. Martinez' family were subpoenaed to testify at Kennedy's "grand jury thing" on September 13, even though they were not present at, and therefore did not witness, the incidents leading to the killing. But the family noted that a few neighbors that reported hearing a scuffle and gunshots were not called to testify. This suggests that the secret hearing followed the familiar pattern we've seen in open hearings, where the victim's family members were interrogated in a way that would lead any observer to conclude that the jury was considering indicting the dead victim rather than the killer.

Actually, the criminalization process extended to the whole family, and began on the day of the shooting, when many family members not present at the scene of the shooting were immediately hauled down to police headquarters. Yet the Martinez family knew of no neighbors that were interviewed by detectives. Family members were held at the station over 2 hours, while Samuel was taken by ambulance to the hospital - alone. He died at the hospital and the family learned of his death via the media, with SJPD thus violating its own written policy which mandates a designated police contact to inform the family. Despite that, the family noted that the police report stated that the family was properly notified. In the twisted world of "officer-involved shootings", police need only assert that a lie is truth and - voila! - it is so.

To further showcase the perverted morals reigning in DA Kennedy's world, family members present at his "grand jury thing" had to come very near the killer flying his gang's colors, i.e strapped in full police uniform, as he sent an intimidating message of his authority to the grand jury.

Finally, with the victim's execution and subsequent trial out of the way, and no effort spared to crush the spirit of the family and the public's spirit of resistance, the September 14 declaration that Patrick Guire would not be charged for killing Samuel Martinez was a mere formality. In fact, I've yet to find any news media that bothered to report it.

All the signs clearly show that official disregard of the public's outrage at police killings is pushing places like San Jose down the path of Cincinnati 2001, Newark and Detroit in 1967, and Watts 1965 – where only one outlet remained for the seething tension resulting from police brutality that always escaped prosecution. How many killers can walk free before some in our communities opt for the street justice of Miami 1980 and Los Angeles 1992? What have city officials learned from the Kerner Commission report that ranked police practices as the #1 "deeply held grievance" causing "acute urban unrest" in 1967?

But times have changed: for years now, many youths have become well-armed, and have been practicing deadly war games as Red and Blue armies. Once those armies clearly see that this nightmare is not a test, but an actual emergency, the guns will turn against a common enemy, and future uprisings in San Jose and other US urban areas are likely to look less like Watts - and more like Fallujah.