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Originally Posted by BillJasper
Might be because it has been nearly three and a half years (May 2011) since the incident happened. But, better late than never.
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There's different reasons prosecutions can be delayed. Here there was a bunch of pretrial litigation involving the applicability of the stand your ground defense. It also looks like they deferred to the federal investigation and undertook their own after it ended. They could have easily let it go at that point, or stuck with their original lesser charge of misconduct in office.
Or maybe they were all just racist. And then forgot to be all racist.
Edit: The defense attorney is already screaming about this indictment being fueled by the prosecutors' grandstanding over recent events. That'll be a big part of the subsequent proceedings, I'm sure. The defense attorneys will accuse the prosecutors of unethical misconduct and appealing to the passions of the jury. So, either they get accused of being racist, or they get accused of trying to land a popular conviction through inappropriate appeals to emotion and matters outside the evidence. At that point, it gets easier to just tune all the morons out and just do your job. There are a ton of cases where SOMEONE is going to think you're crooked/racist/unethical no matter what decisions you make, though only a few get widespread press of course.