Prosecutorial discretion, picking and choosing which cases to pursue, should be and has historically been unremarkable. But like any discretionary authority, it can be abused. If the weighing of the merits of prosecution based on the facts of individual cases morphs into a programmatic decision not to prosecute various categories of crime, it becomes an executive veto of the community’s right to define and punish penal offenses through its legislative representatives…
The key to understanding the Machiavellian brilliance of the Progressive Prosecutor Project is this: As a matter of constitutional law, no legislature or court has the power to order a prosecutor to charge any crime against any person. In our system, prosecution is exclusively an executive call. Practically speaking, short of voting a rogue district attorney out of office, there is no remedy for abusive discretionary omissions—decisions not to prosecute. To be sure, if a prosecutor performs some affirmative illegal act while enforcing the law, there are legal remedies available—motions to suppress evidence, lawsuits against government, potentially even prosecution. But omissions are a different story. It is nigh impossible to force prosecutors to take enforcement action. Thus, a willful district attorney has enormous power to install non-prosecution as the default policy.
Realizing this, the left’s social-justice warriors have grasped that the control of prosecutorial power may be the most effective route to rapid societal transformation. It is transformation driven not by law, logic, or a half-century’s empirical data on offense behavior and policing methods, but by cultural Marxist narratives: the criminal-justice system and its law-enforcement agencies as a superstructure reifying America’s pervasive racism, xenophobia, and forcible oppression of The Other.
ConservativeChick
Article URL : https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-progressive-prosecutor-project/