On July 8, 2013 in the Columbia Law Review, Glenn Reynolds declared: Prosecutorial discretion poses an increasing threat to justice. The threat has in fact grown more severe to the point of becoming a due process issue. He then proved his point by revealing a disgusting game played by zealots working in the Southern District of New York’s US Attorney’s Office, where they would name a famous person – Mother Teresa or John Lenon – and decide how he or she could be prosecuted.
It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape, murder or other crimes you’d see on [TV] but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code…
Tim Wu – American Lawbreaking, Slate (October 14, 2007)
Which leads to the fact that Attorney General (and former Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson was correct when he envisioned that “If a prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows he can choose his defendants. This method results in the most dangerous power of the prosecutor, that [they] will pick people [they] think [they] should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.” And that mentality has lead us to this:
The result of over criminalization is that prosecutors no longer need to wait for obvious signs of a crime. Instead of finding Professor Plum dead in the conservatory and launching an investigation, authorities can instead start an investigation of Colonel Mustard as soon as someone has suggested he is a shady character. And since, as the game Wu describes illustrates, everyone is a criminal if prosecutors look hard enough, they are guaranteed to find something eventually.
Glenn Reynolds – Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process when Everything’s a Crime
And this is why surveillance is such a serious problem. As pointed out in We See It All our liberty is in serious jeopardy. And as my case proves, overzealous & unethical prosecutors (not the police) are a clear and present danger to society because ultimately police have no power, if the prosecutor drops the case that’s the end of it. So if prosecutors wants to stop police misconduct all they have to do is drop cases; however, there are currently very few checks on prosecutorial power and misconduct and we as a society need to address that fact.