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Robert P. McCulloch is the Prosecuting Attorney for St. Louis County, Missouri, a post he has held since 1991. A Democrat, he has historically had bipartisan support as a popular prosecutor and has won re-election in 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014, often unopposed but by wide margins when he has had an opponent.

Education and early career

After attending law school at Saint Louis University, McCulloch served as a clerk for Missouri Appeals Court judge Joseph G. Stewart. McCulloch was an Assistant Prosecuting Attorney from 1978 to 1985. He worked in private practice until 1991, when he was elected to the post of Prosecuting Attorney. McCulloch was president of the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and a board member of the National District Attorneys Association.

Tenure as D.A.

Just after he first took office in the early 1990s, McCulloch prosecuted Axl Rose of the band Guns N’ Roses on charges related to the Riverport Riot in which 40 concert attendees and 25 police officers were injured. McCulloch charged Rose with misdemeanor assault and property damage for allegedly hitting a security guard, hurting three concertgoers and damaging a dressing room at Riverport Amphitheatre. McCulloch made headlines when he pursued Rose across the country to serve an arrest warrant in the case, before Rose finally turned himself in and agreed to a plea deal.

In 1997, in the so-called "Kinkogate" case, McCulloch gave a subpoena to the police – using the power of the grand jury, but without informing it – in order to identify a whistleblower who was acting lawfully. He first claimed the fax contained a threat but later conceded that there was no threat and no crime, but denied any wrongdoing. The whistleblower had to quit his job.

In 2000, in the so-called "Jack in the Box" case, two undercover officers, a police officer and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officer, shot and killed two unarmed black men in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box fast-food restaurant in Berkeley, Missouri. In 2001, the officers told a grand jury convened by McCulloch that the suspects tried to escape arrest and then drove toward them; the jury declined to indict. McCulloch told the public that every witness had testified to confirm this version, but St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Michael Sorkin reviewed the previously secret grand jury tapes, released to him by McCulloch, and found that McCulloch's statement was untrue: only three of 13 officers testified that the car was moving forward. A subsequent federal investigation found that the men were unarmed and that their car had not moved forward when the officers fired 21 shots; nevertheless, federal investigators decided that the shooting was justified because the officers feared for their safety. McCulloch also drew controversy when he said of the victims: "These guys were bums." The two men killed, Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley, had prior felony convictions on drug and assault charges.

During the 2008 Presidential campaign McCulloch endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama. He was accused by some Republicans of abuse of power for being a member of the Barack Obama Truth Squads in Missouri. McCulloch defended his participation, calling the notion he was trying to criminalize political speech "nonsense."

In 2013, McCulloch publicly switched his longtime allegiance from fellow Democrat and St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley to support Dooley's challenger in the Democratic primary for county executive, Steve Stenger, stating that Dooley oversaw too much corruption in the county. With help from television ads from McCulloch, Stenger won over Dooley in the Aug. 5, 2014 primary by a landslide.

Michael Brown case

After the August 9, 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, McCulloch announced that rather than making a decision about whether to arrest Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, he would bring the case before a grand jury, leaving to jurors the decision of what charges might be brought, if any. His spokesman acknowledged that it was unusual that the prosecutor was not asking the grand jury to endorse a specific charge. It was also unusual to present a case to a grand jury before the police investigation was over.

Cornell Brooks, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), called for a special prosecutor to replace McCulloch in the case, saying that was needed to restore credibility with Ferguson's black community, and Missouri Senator Jamilah Nasheed presented a petition with 70,000 signatures calling for McCulloch's recusal, based on accusations from the 2000 incident, his support of Stenger over Dooley and his close relationship with the police: his father, brother, uncle and cousin were police officers; his mother was a clerk for two decades.

In his 23 years on the job, this was the fifth time Robert McCulloch presented evidence to a grand jury in a shooting by police; in each case the grand jury came back without an indictment.

McCulloch was critical of Gov. Jay Nixon's decision to replace St. Louis County Police control with Missouri State Highway Patrol.

On November 24 at 10:59 P.M., Prosecutor McCulloch reported in a 20-minute press conference that the grand jury reached a decision in the case and elected "not to indict Wilson."

Some legal experts asserted that McCulloch deflected responsibility for failing to indict Wilson, and created conditions in which the grand jury would not indict him either. Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard University, said that "As a strategic move, it was smart; he got what he wanted without being seen as directly responsible for the result," and called the case "the most unusual marshaling of a grand jury's resources I've seen in my 25 years as a lawyer and scholar." The New Yorker's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, accused McCulloch for implementing "a document dump, an approach that is virtually without precedent in the law of Missouri or anywhere else". According to the Los Angeles Times, legal experts chided McCulloch for not challenging Wilson's account of the shooting.

Rudy Giuliani said that the prosecution could have never convicted Wilson at a trial and that the grand jury made the right decision not to indict Wilson. Giuliani went on to state he didn't "think there's any question they didn't have probable cause" and "if you can't prove probable cause, how are you going to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt when the witnesses are contradicting themselves?"

Ben Trachtenberg, a University of Missouri law professor, stated that it was unusual for McCulloch to provide such an overwhelming amount of evidence, and stopped short of saying that he did so in order to keep the grand jury from charging Wilson, as usually a grand jury get to assess much less evidence before being asked to indict given that all that needs to be proved is probable cause.

James A. Cohen, a law professor at Fordham University, said that " did worse than abdicate his responsibility: He structured the presentation so the jurors would vote no true bill". Cohen further asserted that there was "an enormous disconnect between how the officer describes the events in his car versus the 'injuries' he suffered", which McCulloch accepted without applying the necessary forensic rigor, and that if Wilson feared for his life as he testified, he could have stayed in the car rather than pursuing Brown.

According to the New York Times, Attorney General Holder was critical of McCulloch's long presentation and invoking his name during the press conference, as well as the poor timing late at night, which may have played a part on the unrest that followed.

Tom Nolan, the director of graduate programs in criminology at Merrimack College and a 27-year veteran and former lieutenant of the Boston Police Department, wrote that McCulloch's decision to allow Wilson to testify is "practically unheard of—in my 36 years as a practitioner and an academic working, studying, and teaching in the criminal-justice system, I have never heard of this rather novel legal maneuver being put into what many would consider a rather imprudent and questionable practice", and that McCulloch's decision to bring the case to a grand jury was "largely in deference to Wilson's status as a police officer".

Jay Sterling Silver, a professor at the St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami, described McCulloch's announcement of the grand jury decision as "rambling" and "Orwellian", and criticized him for diverting attention from the failure to indict Wilson, for blaming the media for disrupting the grand jury process, and for shifting responsibility to the community to reduce police killings.

Jeff Roorda, the business manager for the St. Louis Police Officers Association, appeared on the talk show All In with Chris Hayes and said that McCulloch only convened a grand jury to “oblige the public outcry when he didn’t believe there was enough to charge”, and that McCulloch, "should have said there's not enough evidence to pursue a charge here. He should have never taken it to the grand jury."

Mark Weisbrotm, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, referred to McCulloch as "one of the best attorneys anyone in situation could have had", helping Wilson not only in the legal proceedings, but as a skilled public relations manager, who probably convinced a large number of people that the grand jury proceedings were akin to a trial.

Personal life

McCulloch is the son of a St. Louis police officer who was killed in the line of duty while searching for a fleeing kidnapper when McCulloch was 12 years old. When he was in high school, McCulloch lost a leg to cancer.

McCulloch and his wife Carolyn have four children.

References

1. ^ "St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney". Retrieved September 20, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
2. "Testimony of The Honorable Robert McCulloch" (PDF). 2003-09-17. Retrieved 3 December 2014.
3. ^ Nicholas J.C. Pistor and Joe Holleman (August 16, 2014). "St. Louis prosecutor has faced controversy for decades". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Retrieved September 9, 2014. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
4. ^ Sorkin, Michael D. (August 17, 2014). "20,000 sign petitions seeking special prosecutor in Michael Brown shooting". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Retrieved September 19, 2014. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
5. ^ Robles, Frances (August 20, 2014). "St. Louis County Prosecutor Defends Objectivity". New York Times. Retrieved September 18, 2014. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
6. http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/8699/missouri-prosecutors-sheriffs-target-anyone-who-lies-about-barack-obama
7. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2008/09/attacking-obama/
8. Christine Byers and Steve Giegerich (October 10, 2013). "St. Louis County prosecutor pulls his support of Dooley in next election". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Retrieved September 20, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
9. ^ Byers, Christine (September 16, 2014). "Grand jury now has until January to decide whether to charge Ferguson officer". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Retrieved September 17, 2014.
10. Kimberly Kindy and Carol D. Leonnig (September 7, 2014). "In atypical approach, grand jury in Ferguson shooting receives full measure of case". Washington Post. Retrieved September 23, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
11. "What Happened in Ferguson?". The New York Times. November 24, 2014. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved December 3, 2014.
12. Kaplan, Rebecca; Face The Nation (August 17, 2014). "NAACP president: Special prosecutor "critically important" in Ferguson". CBS News. Archived from the original on August 18, 2014. Retrieved August 26, 2014. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
13. Chuck, Elizabeth (August 21, 2014). "Petition Against Prosecutor in Ferguson Case Has 70,000 Signatures". NBC News. Archived from the original on August 22, 2014. Retrieved August 26, 2014. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
14. "Bob McCulloch's pathetic prosecution of Darren Wilson". Washington Post. November 28, 2014. Retrieved November 25, 2014.
15. Staff (August 15, 2014). "McCulloch blasts Nixon for replacing St. Louis County Police control". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Retrieved September 20, 2014. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
16. Joe Millitzer (August 13, 2014). "Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch talks about Mike Brown shooting". Fox News. Retrieved September 20, 2014. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
17. Basu, Moni; Yan, Holly; Ford, Dana (November 25, 2014). "Fires, chaos erupt in Ferguson after grand jury doesn't indict in Michael Brown case". CNN. Archived from the original on December 2, 2014. Retrieved November 26, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
18. ^ Zucchino, David (November 25, 2014). "Prosecutor's grand jury strategy in Ferguson case adds to controversy". The Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on November 26, 2014. Retrieved November 26, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
19. Diamond, Jeremy (November 25, 2014). "Giuliani on Ferguson: Right decision, prosecution could 'never have won'". CNN. Archived from the original on November 26, 2014. Retrieved November 26, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
20. Bello, Marisol; Toppo, Greg; Eisler, Peter (November 25, 2014). "Grand jury charges are easy, except against police". USA Today. Retrieved November 26, 2014.
21. Apuzzo, Matt (November 25, 2014). "As Protests Take a Turn, Holder Finds It Harder to Ease Racial Tensions". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 27, 2014. Retrieved November 26, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
22. "Tom Nolan". The Daily Beast. n.d. Archived from the original on December 4, 2014. Retrieved November 28, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
23. Nolan, Tom (November 28, 2014). "Prosecutor Used Grand Jury to Let Darren Wilson Walk". The Daily Beast. Retrieved November 28, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
24. "A hopeless conflict of interests". The Washington Post. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
25. Meyerson, Collier. "McCulloch supporter: McCulloch never intended to indict Wilson". MSNBC. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
26. Weisbrotm, Mark. "In Ferguson, a Prosecutor Manipulates the Justice System to Prevent Indictment". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
27. Paul Brown (April 19, 2012). "Persons of Interest: Bob McCulloch". Ladue News. Retrieved September 20, 2014. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)

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