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The temporary restraining order comes just weeks after the last rounds of heavy protest in Ferguson in response to a St. Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown Jr. A group of protesters had filed the lawsuit asking for a restriction on police use of tear gas and excessive force during demonstrations.

U.S. Federal Judge Carol Jackson heard testimony for nine hours, from plaintiffs as well as police from St. Louis County and the city of St. Louis, according to Brendan Roediger, one of the lead attorney’s on the case. 

“Ultimately she decided there was substantial evidence that police had violated the constitutional rights of the protesters, that it was a restriction on their free speech,” Roediger told msnbc shortly after the judge made her ruling.

instead she worked with the writers to have her character deal with him in ways much more subtle, clever, interesting and involving a cat who is knighted

The rarity of a federal grand jury not indicting, visualized

A data point from FiveThirtyEight’s coverage of Monday night’s events in Ferguson is worth pulling out. “U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010,” the site’s Ben Casselman writes, “the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.”

That data is from a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and covers October 1, 2009, to September 30, 2010. Over that time period, over 193,000 federal offenses were investigated, about 16 percent of which were declined for prosecution. That leaves just over 162,300 offenses that the government tried to prosecute. And the grand jury decided against doing so 11 times, finding no true bill or a lack of evidence to do so.

Notice how incredibly rare it is to not grant a case the bare minimum of a trial.  Especially in the face of conflicting testimonies and overwhelming evidence that there is more to the story, it’s outrageous (racist) that the Grand Jury would come to such a rare conclusion.

There are a few more routes to justice at this point, although their effectiveness is debatable:

-The Justice Department can press federal charges (they’re being urged by the National Bar Association to do so) -The Justice Department can bring charges against Ferguson PD -The Brown family can bring a civil suit against Darren Wilson