Robert McCulloch has no regrets from 28 years as St. Louis County Prosecutor, in particular how he led the 2014 grand jury investigation of a Ferguson patrol officer’s killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. McCulloch blames the Ferguson protests for his defeat. He lost a primary election to Ferguson Councilman Wesley Bell who ran on a pledge to “fundamentally change the culture” of the prosecutor’s office. “Ferguson is the only reason I’m retiring on Dec. 31,” McCulloch said. “I’ve been getting beaten down on Ferguson for four years.” McCulloch touted highlights of his career, including developing drug and mental health courts, creating a team of victims advocates and building “a truly, highly professional, well-trained office.”
He cited his work on the “truth-in-sentencing law,” requiring people convicted of violent crimes to serve at least 85 percent of their sentence, establishing a sex crimes unit and making the office a place where prosecutors could earn enough money to enable them to make the job their career. “You will never find a case in this country involving a fatal police shooting that was more thoroughly vetted than that case,” McCulloch said of the Brown killing. “And yet there’s a perception out there among a lot of people who voted against me that somehow we hid it and tanked it.” At 67, McCulloch is returning to private life. He says he lost the race to someone whose platform relied on “empty” rhetoric and “bogus” claims about his administration. He is worried his successor has focused more on the rights of defendants over crime victims. On low-level drug cases, he said, “You find me the kid who got picked up with a bag of weed in his pocket who’s in the penitentiary, and I will go get him out. He does not exist.”