Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani stated that the Ferguson grand jury's decision to not indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of 18-year-old unarmed Michael Brown was the only "correct" decision it could have reached in the racially charged case.
Prosecutors would never have been able to win a trial to convict the 28-year-old cop, Giuliani said on CNN Tuesday. "I believe it was a correct verdict. In fact, I think it was the only verdict the grand jury could reach."
Giuliani, a longtime mayor and former U.S. attorney, argued that the high-profile case against Wilson failed the two tests that should be considered in weighing an indictment: whether there is evidence of probable cause and whether a prosecutor could secure a conviction in the case.
"As a prosecutor, you couldn't possibly have won that case," Giuliani said. "They would've been destroyed at trial by a halfway competent defense lawyer, because of all the inconsistencies."
"If you can't prove probable cause, how are you going to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt when the witnesses are contradicting themselves?" the one-time Republican presidential candidate added.
On Sunday's "Meet the Press," Giuliani sparked controversy over his contention that the fatal shooting of Brown is not emblematic of a larger national problem, Yahoo News reported.
"I find it very disappointing that you're not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks," Giuliani said. "We're talking about the exception here."
"Black people who kill black people go to jail," Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson, who was also a guest on "Meet the Press," replied. "White people who are policemen who kill black people do not go to jail."
However on Tuesday, Giuliani refused to back away from his comments.
"I said the same thing the president of the United States said, and I was accused of being a racist," the former mayor said on CNN. "The president of the United States said because the minorities typically are subject to more crime, they need law enforcement more than anybody else. When he said it, he wasn't accused of being a racist."
The 70-year-old, who lost his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, also criticized President Barack Obama's comments in the wake of the grand jury's decision.
"When the president was talking last night about training the police, of course, the police should be trained," Giuliani said. "He also should have spent 15 minutes on training the [black] community to stop killing each other. In numbers that are incredible - incredible - 93 percent of blacks are shot by other blacks. They are killing each other. And the racial arsonists, who enjoyed last night, this was their day of glory."
But he added that law enforcement officials should have responded more directly and forcefully to protests that turned violent Monday night, claiming that left to him, the police presence would have been doubled or tripled.
"You have every right to protest, you have every right to scream, you have every right to yell. The first time you throw something at a police officer, you get handcuffed, arrested and taken away," Giuliani said.
