Following the Ferguson grand jury's decision to decline to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown, statistics blog FiveThirtyEight has shared numbers that indicate just how unusual that outcome is:
Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to "indict a ham sandwich." The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them. [FiveThirtyEight]
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