Reverend Al Sharpton at the Justice for All rally, 2014. Stephen Melkisethian/Flickr. Some rights reserved.On 22 November 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was fatally shot by a police officer while playing in a park in Cleveland, Ohio.
As in many other cases of police shootings, the prosecutor decided not to press charges. In an attempt to push the prosecution, on 9 June 2015, a group of community leaders in Cleveland invoked a rarely used law that allows private citizens to request that a judge determine if a prosecutor should issue an arrest warrant. Following their filing of six affidavits, a Cleveland Municipal Court judge released an opinion finding probable cause to charge two police officers for various criminal offenses. However, he also added that he did not have the power to order an arrest without a complaint being filed by the prosecutors.
Demonstration in Washington. Anokarina/Flickr. Some rights reserved.These latest legal manoeuvres in the Rice case offer up an opportunity to reflect on the issue of prosecutorial discretion and on the legal resources that are available to victims of police abuse or human rights violations to challenge such discretion. Prosecutorial discretion grants power to a prosecutor to decide whether to prosecute or, in jurisdictions that require an indictment by a grand jury, whether to take the case to a grand jury. This discretion has many merits (for example, increasing efficiency and reducing the backlog of cases), but in human rights cases it can certainly be problematic.
