In The Other FBI Scandal in The Future of Capitalism some shenanigans conducted by an FBI agent. And it's a reminder that they aren't all saints. It's worth a look.
But my focus is on a short quote found there from Attorney General Robert H. Jackson in a speech 78 years ago. Some search engine sleuthing revealed the speech here: THE FEDERAL PROSECUTOR. There AG Jackson describes the powers a prosecutor has and sometimes abuses. Here's an excerpt:
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, 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.
Scary stuff. But he ends the speech on a positive note, to wit:
The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive and as impossible to define as those which mark a gentleman. And those who need to be told would not understand it anyway. A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen's safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.
If only they all would seek "truth and not victims."
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3:42 PM 2/9/2018
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