Journalists and legal analysts have now had several days to sift through the witness testimony from Ferguson, Missouri. Based on their analysis—which you can read via the New York Times, National Public Radio, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among others—two things seem pretty clear.

One is that prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s handling of the case was even more unusual than it seemed at first blush. As you’ve probably heard by now, prosecutors typically use grand juries to make their best case for indictments. That’s not what McCulloch did. He presented the grand jury with all of the available evidence, effectively treating the twelve-member group as a separate investigative body, so that they could make their own, supposedly unbiased determination about whether Officer Darren Wilson committed a crime when he shot Michael Brown on August 9.

The idea of a grand jury as an independent investigative body has some origins in history. But, as Jeffrey Toobin explained at the New Yorker last week, grand juries are always at the mercy of prosecutors and there's good reason to think McCulloch had a clear agenda:

In sending Wilson’s case to the grand jury, McCulloch technically turned over to them the decision about whether to prosecute. By submitting all the evidence to the grand jury, he added to the perception that this process represented an independent evaluation of the evidence. But there is little doubt that he remained largely in control of the process; aggressive advocacy by prosecutors could have persuaded the grand jurors to vote for some kind of indictment. The standard for such charges—probable cause, or more probable than not—is generally a very easy hurdle. If McCulloch’s lawyers had simply pared down the evidence to that which incriminated Wilson, they would have easily obtained an indictment.

If anything, McCulloch and his staff took the opposite approach. The witnesses who challenged Wilson’s version of events frequently faced tough questioning, as if the lawyers were trying to poke holes in their testimony. Wilson did not get the same treatment, at least judging by the transcripts. “It seemed the cross-examination of witnesses that conflicted with [Wilson’s] account was much more robust, and that there was very little cross-examination of him,” Rachel Barkow, a law professor at New York University, told the Times. It’s one more reason to think that McCulloch should have stepped aside or been replaced.

The other takeaway from the testimony is that witness accounts diverged, sometimes sharply. (If you haven’t yet seen the amazing chart that PBS Newshour put together, you really should.) One big dispute was over what happened after the initial altercation at Wilson’s police vehicle, once Brown had run away and Wilson had chased him. Brown eventually turned back towards Wilson and, according to virtually every witness who testified, Brown raised his hands when he did so. But did Brown raise them high or low? Were they palms out, as if he was surrendering, or balled up in a fist, as if he was making an aggressive move? The forensic evidence seems to make clear that Brown started moving back towards Wilson—but was he charging or staggering? Again, the witnesses say different things.