When discussing the fury over the failure by Ferguson's grand jury to indict officer Darren Wilson for the murder of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, it is important to remember just how pervasive the US history of legally sanctioned racism is.

Many people still living today remember the era when racism was both the custom and the enforced law of the land. When African-Americans faced assaults or murder at the hands of whites, be they police or private citizens, many jurors did not even bother to leave the jury box before proclaiming the suspect innocent. Of course, the same immunity did not apply to blacks accused of assaulting whites.

While racism no longer has such formal backing in US legal system, many minorities still face disproportionately harsh sentences, are more likely to come into negative contact with law enforcement, and are more likely than whites to be arrested or killed by police.

In several other cases, known as "Houdini Handcuff" suicides, African-American individuals have "committed suicide" after being secured and placed into police custody.

Although these cases are not directly related to the Ferguson shooting, they help create an atmosphere in which there is already a great deal of suspicion aimed at the police and legal institutions the US functions under. Put bluntly, few minorities believe that they are equal under the law, or in the eyes of police officers.

The Ferguson case has only confirmed these suspicions.

A grand jury is far different from a criminal trial. A criminal trial must convict beyond a reasonable doubt, while a grand jury merely seeks to determine if there is sufficient evidence to justify moving forward with a criminal trial.

In fact, New York Chief Judge Sol Wachtler stated that prosecutors could convince a grand jury to "indict a ham sandwich." In other words, grand juries are far more likely to provide an indictment than to refuse it.

Thus, the mere fact that the Ferguson grand jury did not return an indictment is in and of itself unusual, especially given the wide range of contradictory information and witness statements provided to it.

While perhaps not sufficient for the standard of proof demanded in a criminal trial, such evidence is generally more than adequate to obtain an indictment.

In addition, many aspects of the grand jury's deliberations appear to have deviated rather far from the traditional duties of a grand jury.

For example, Wilson was allowed to present "his side" of the evidence, introducing exculpatory evidence into the grand jury proceeding. A number of legal experts have pointed out that this is an extremely unusual step to take, especially on the part of the prosecutor.

While this decision was unusual, it is not actively illegal. In US v. Williams, the Supreme Court pointed out that grand juries operate in a fundamentally different manner than criminal or civil trials and are thus not held to the same procedural standards.

However, according to Justice Antonin Scalia, "It is axiomatic that the grand jury sits not to determine guilt or innocence, but to assess whether there is adequate basis for bringing a criminal charge. See US v. Calandra, 414 US, at 343. That has always been so; and to make the assessment it has always been thought sufficient to hear only the prosecutor's side."

In this case, whether or not any specific law was breached, the impression is that the prosecutor deliberately threw the case in order to ensure that Wilson was not brought to trial, a disgraceful dereliction of duty if so.

And this impression, when combined with the long tradition of cultural and legal racism, makes it very hard to conclude that race did not play a role, both in the shooting and in how it was handled by the local authorities.

If Brown had been white, would the result have been different? Almost certainly. For many, the judgment of this grand jury proves that institutionalized racism is alive and well in the US.