Although a grand jury declined to indict the two Cleveland police officers involved in the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty wasnt exactly acting like a someone who had suffered a major legal failure.

At a press conference on Monday, McGinty made no secret of the fact that he agreed with the decision, admitting that he had recommended to the grand jury that it not indict officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback.

The prosecutor had already attempted to convince the grand jury not to indict the men, commissioning expert reports that called their guilt into question and then leaking those reports to the media. As The Huffington Posts Cristian Farias wrote , McGinty turned the grand jury in the Tamir Rice case into his plaything.

But on Monday, he didn't merely suggest that the police officers' use of force against Rice was justified. He selectively used information to excuse and defend their actions, and implicitly blamed the unarmed African-American boy who was killed -- something that is all too common in police killings.

Here are some of McGintys most questionable claims and observations:

Timothy Loehmann was a reasonable police officer.

McGinty characterized Timothy Loehmann -- who shot Rice within seconds of arriving on the scene -- as a reasonable police officer. The grand jury also declined to indict Frank Garmback, who drove Loehmann in the police cruiser.

The Supreme Court instructs to judge an officer by what he or she knew at the moment, not by what was learned later, McGinty said. We are instructed to ask what a reasonable police officer, with the knowledge he had, would do in this particular situation.

But McGinty failed to explain that Loehmann's perception of what was "reasonable" may have been questionable.

After five months on the job, Loehmann quit the police force of the Cleveland suburb of Independence, Ohio, in December 2012, days after a deputy police chief recommended his dismissal. The deputy police chief based his recommendation on a firearms instructors report, obtained by NBC News , that Loehmann was experiencing an emotional meltdown that made his facility with a handgun dismal.

They put a police officer in this situation who had a history of mental health problems, said Michael Benza, a criminal law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. It may not have been reasonable for him to shoot given his mental issues.

Tamir Rice was big and scary.

McGinty suggested that 12-year-old Rice was threatening, though he conceded that the boy may have meant to explain that his gun was fake just before he was killed. According to the prosecutor, Rice looked bigger than most children his age and had already been warned that his gun might frighten people.

If we put ourselves in the victims shoes, as prosecutors and detectives try to do, it is likely that Tamir, whose size made him look much older and who had been warned that his pellet gun might get him into trouble that day, either intended to hand it over to the officers or show them it wasnt a real gun, McGinty said.

While Rices appearance and the possibility that someone had warned him not to carry a toy gun may have been enough for a grand jury to determine that the officers' actions were justified, this does not mean that shooting him was unavoidable.

Steve Martin, an expert on the use of force in corrections settings, called the facts McGinty mentioned kind of tangential.

If you come upon a situation where there is risk of harm, the question is how imminent is the threat, Martin said. That controls whether you can take time and distance to assess -- time to put distance between yourself and the subject" to assess whether the threat requires immediate action.

Driving up so close to Rice was likely a poor tactical decision by Garmback, the officer at the wheel, according to a former senior police official in another city who requested anonymity in order to comment freely, given the sensitivity of the case. The official currently helps a city government manage claims of excessive force or other wrongdoing by police officers.

That was a tactical decision that required the man to make a much more rapid decision, he said. It looks like they could have stopped 100 or 200 yards away and taken cover.

Still, McGinty and the grand jury evaluating the case believed the cops had a reasonable belief that Rice posed an immediate danger, according to the prosecutor.

That was likely all officers needed to avoid indictment, since the legal threshold for indicting officers for use of force in the line of duty is incredibly high and a unique grand jury process was already tilted in the cops favor.

By taking the time to mention Rices size and possibly unwise decision to carry a toy gun, McGinty both implied that Rice had it coming and reinforced a common perception that black boys seem older and more menacing.

Psychologists have found that female U.S. college students who were shown photos of boys of different races viewed African-American boys ages 10 and older as less innocent than their white peers. The young women also estimated that the boys were 4.5 years older on average than they actually were.