Another of those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned “Read more…” clickbait Tweets, so no embed, but the magic of C&P instead.
Kerri Kupec Urbahn
@Kerri_KupecSince Alvin Bragg in his speech last night mentioned District Attorney Thomas Dewey from the 1930s, I think it’s only appropriate to mention US Attorney General Robert Jackson from the 1940s and his warning to federal prosecutors about their capacity to abuse the law. Key excerpts:
“The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous. He can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations. Or the prosecutor may choose a more subtle course and simply have a citizen’s friends interviewed. The prosecutor can order arrests, present cases to the grand jury in secret session, and on the basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial. He may dismiss the case before trial, in which case the defense never has a chance to be heard. Or he may go on with a public trial. If he obtains a conviction, the prosecutor can still make recommendations as to sentence, as to whether the prisoner should get probation or a suspended sentence, and after he is put away, as to whether he is a fit subject for parole. While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.”
“If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm-in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.”
By George, I think she’s got it. Far from being inconsequential, the thuggish, premeditated savaging of a former President’s right—every American’s right, in fact—to due process in open court trial presided over by a learned, impartial judge, the outcome decided with a verdict rendered by twelve jurors honest and true, is of unparalleled moment. It is, as some dirty, rotten scoundrel or other •cough-coughBIDENcough-cough* boasted in a different context *cough-coughOBAMACAREcough-cough*, a “big fucking deal.” The biggest fucking deal in my entire lifetime, actually.
To supinely permit such an extraordinary profanation to pass without a swift, forceful, vehement response would be a monumental disgrace—an unpardonable sin which would redound on generations yet to come. To allow such a grievous insult to American integrity to fade from collective memory, then to be supplanted by the next manufactured Enemedia Outrage O’ The Day, would constitute, quite literally, a crime most heinous in and of itself.