Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
So, two things, which you keep running together.
First, if someone does crimes, they did crimes, and they should get the consequences. That includes Trump and Biden. Trump committed felonies and he was convicted. The fact that he has a political following doesn't change that.
(If something isn't a crime, and prosecutors entrap someone or suborn perjury, etc., that's different. If Trump should have been able to present a defense and wasn't permitted to, or if the prosecution relied on a novel legal theory that went too far, an appellate court can fix that. That's not prosecutorial conduct, just how the law works. People who don't pay their taxes aren't usually threatened with criminal prosecution but with civil enforcement. That's fine, unless there is something bad faith or abusive about the threats, but you seem to think the threat of prosecution itself is abusive when applied to non-violent crimes.)
Second, every day, prosecutors have to decide which cases to pursue. As you know, I did this for several years. You seem to think with the right kind of defendant -- wealthy, accused of non-violent crime -- that these decisions are presumptively suspect, that the financial crimes unit should go and prosecute violent crimes instead. I tend to think that these decisions are highly fact-intensive and very difficult to second guess unless you are in the room. I also tend to think the prosecutors don't like to waste their time, and don't want to work on cases they won't win, which acts as a check on bringing bad cases. This also may be a bad thing in some instances where prosecutors arguably should be more aggressive to serve the public good, like rape cases and antitrust mergers.
If you want to have a conversation about how prosecutorial discretion is exercised, great. But that discussion does not change the fact that Trump did crimes and was convicted of those crimes in a scrutinized and fair process in which he really failed to offer any kind of meaningful defense. That result, IMO, vindicates the DA from the silly attacks that you are making, because the proof was in the pudding.
|
Jaywalking is a crime. If a NYC cop randomly pulls someone off the street for jaywalking while watching dozens of others do it at the same time, is this excusable under the notion, "Do the crime, do the time"?
I could walk into the Sphere on any given night and arrest loads of people for illegal drugs. Perhaps even finding acid or mushrooms, which are still subject to draconian penalties. Is this ok just because, oh well, it's a crime.
Would it be sane to send me to federal prison for transporting psilocybin over state lines when traveling back and for from a beach vacation? Am I a danger to society?
The IRS explicitly - as policy - refrains from doing aggressive audits on bars and restaurants because it recognizes that there's the law, and then there's what everybody in the industry does.
We live in a giant grey zone where people commit felonies all the time, intentionally and unintentionally, and law enforcement looks the other way. Indeed it must, or everyone would have a criminal record.
Abuse occurs when a prosecutor decides to cherry pick certain people for prosecution. And it isn't merely white collar criminals. The "tough on crime" brigade of idiot voters have for decades now convinced unethical prosecutors to aggressively go after criminals in reckless manners, and seek extreme penalties. Barry Scheck has freed how many people wrongly on death row at the this point? And how many dozens of the cases of prosecutorial cheating, (hiding exculpatory evidence, etc.) were included ih that data set? A lot.
Trump himself sought, disgustingly, to have the prosecutors seek the death penalty against the Central Park Five who were later determined to be innocent.
This is a long way of saying that where a prosecution is pursued for political means, and that is irrefutable in the case Bragg brought but Cyrus Vance would not, it is abusive. It is rotten, and it properly telecasts to all that something is rotten in the system. And it is.
You can try to argue that Biden's and Trump's cases are defensible because they resulted in convictions, but you're on an island there. People can sense what's rotten, what's corrupt, and even people who think Trump deserves every bad break he gets (like yours truly) can recognize banana republic behavior when they see it.
Final point, and perhaps most important. The public should be skeptical of our justice system. It should disregard convictions and acquittals in biased forums. It should assume that findings by courts are wrong as often as right, and the system is overburdened and stupidly based on an ancient anglo saxon principle that letting adversaries fight things out somehow leads to truth. Because that's bullshit. And everybody who works in the system knows it. Cases are decided based on bias of forum, bias of jurists, bias of juries, sloppiness of the statutes under which they're brought (present in Trump's NY case and Biden's gun case), and lastly, facts. There are so many elements of luck and chicanery in the systems that anyone having significant faith in it is credulous. ...Or perhaps as those of us who've done enough of it tell any client who claims he wants justice, "Well, then stay the fuck out of the courthouse."
