Aug
11

The Rogue Prosecutor Movement Funded by Leftist Billionaires

“This well-funded and organized movement is not about liberal versus conservative, Democrat versus Republican, or black versus white. It is about power.” — Charles “Cully” Stimson, attorney, author, and deputy director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies

This week’s post consists primarily of portions of an Imprimis article adapted from Cully Stimson’s talk earlier this year at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale College’s D.C. campus. In addition to the activities mentioned above, Stimson is a thirty-year Navy veteran, former prosecutor in San Diego and Maryland and assistant U.S. attorney in D.C., currently a senior advisor to the president at The Heritage Foundation, and serves as manager of Heritage’s National Security Law Program.

The subject of this talk/article springs from the book he co-authored with Zack Smith, Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities.

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The writers of our Constitution placed their faith not in specific guarantees of rights — those came later — but in a system of checks on government power. Foremost is the separation of powers among the three branches of the federal government, as well as between the federal government and the states. For this system to work as designed, people in each branch of the federal government and in the state governments must do their jobs and stay in their respective lanes.

But what happens when district attorneys — members of their states’ executive branches — refuse to execute the laws of the land? We are witnessing the results today in blue cities across America.

Approximately 90 percent of criminal cases in the U.S. are handled by the 2,300 elected district attorneys spread across 3,143 counties. The rest are prosecuted by U.S. attorneys operating under the Department of Justice. Until recently, elected county district attorneys upheld their end of the social contract by firmly and fairly enforcing state criminal laws and protecting citizens’ rights. Regardless of party affiliation, these gatekeepers of the criminal justice system did their job. Over the last 30 years, they played a critical role in driving down crime rates, which peaked in 1992, by prosecuting violent criminals, while at the same time creating thousands of alternatives to incarceration, such as drug courts, domestic violence courts, mental health courts, and other highly successful programs.

That changed in 2015 with the launching of the George Soros-funded “progressive prosecutor” movement. This movement is animated by two beliefs. The first is that the entire criminal justice system is systemically racist. The second is that the only way to fix the system is to dismantle it by replacing law-and-order district attorneys with pro-criminal and anti-police district attorneys. The sick irony of this movement is that in the areas where it has prevailed, the most harm has been done to the racial minorities whose interests it purports to represent….

From the start, the movement focused on the fact that prosecutors, not police, are the gatekeepers of the criminal justice system. District attorneys decide whether to file charges and which charges to file. By replacing traditional prosecutors with attorneys who see defendants as victims, it would be possible to “reverse-engineer” and “dismantle” the existing criminal justice system….

Over the past decade, Soros has spent more than $40 million on campaigns to elect rogue prosecutors. One group has estimated that he has donated as much as $1 billion to the cause, if policy infrastructure, media relations, sponsored academic and think tank papers, lobbying campaigns, and grassroots organizing are taken into account. Other billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, and Patty Quillin, the wife of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, have also generously contributed to the cause….

Prosecutorial discretion is not limitless. The principle behind it requires the enforcement of laws except in cases when prosecutors believe in good faith that an applicable law is unconstitutional. It does not give prosecutors the power to redefine crime and punishment. By refusing to prosecute entire categories of crime, they are in effect repealing criminal statutes — acting in place of the legislature. This is prosecutorial nullification, not discretion.

Valid prosecutorial discretion takes many forms, but when we allow for the chronic violation of law, we erode the foundation of our cities and civilization — and respect for the rule of law evaporates.

Today, there more than 70 rogue prosecutors across the country. They represent more than 72 million people, or one in five Americans, and they proudly refuse to prosecute most misdemeanors, claiming that these are essentially harmless “quality of life” crimes that divert scarce resources. To take one example, Rachael Rollins, the former district attorney of Suffolk County (Boston), posted a list of 15 misdemeanors her office would not prosecute, including trespassing, shoplifting, larceny under $250, disturbing the peace, receiving stolen property, operating a vehicle with a suspended or revoked license, wanton or malicious destruction of property, and possession with intent to distribute illegal drugs….

In addition to not prosecuting misdemeanors, rogue prosecutors often reduce felonies to misdemeanors and limit the number of charges a prosecutor can bring in a case to one, even though a suspect may have committed multiple offenses. One of [George] Gascon’s most controversial directives in Los Angeles prohibits prosecutors from adding sentencing enhancements or allegations that would support such enhancements to an indictment — even though in some circumstances, California law requires prosecutors to do so. Prosecutors working in Gascon’s office cannot allege any three- or five-year priors, add gang enhancements, file three-strikes allegations, or allege special circumstances that would result in a sentence of life without parole or the death penalty.

In many cities, young gang recruits commit violent felonies to prove their “street cred.” Yet most rogue prosecutors refuse to prosecute violent teenagers as adults, instead sending them to juvenile court, where the worst punishment they can get is juvenile detention until they turn 21.

One of the most pernicious policies to come out of the rogue prosecutor movement is the refusal to ask for cash bail, which represents a guarantee by a defendant (or by a person acting on behalf of a defendant) that the defendant will show up for trial. The amount required for bail varies by jurisdiction and by crime. Those who cannot afford to post bail remain in custody pending trial. But district attorneys including Kim Foxx in Chicago, Gascon (who succeeded Kamala Harris), and Chesa Boudin (formerly in San Francisco) have directed their prosecutors not to ask for cash bail in many cases. And they do not seem bothered by the fact that this has led to additional crimes, including murder….

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This movement is reprehensible and incredibly dangerous! I’d like to repeat something Stimson said above which is well-stated but I think people sometimes don’t think through:

“[W]hen we allow for the chronic violation of law, we erode the foundation of our cities and civilization — and respect for the rule of law evaporates.”

On the plus side, Stimson does see signs of hope, as rogue prosecutors have been voted out or forced to resign in places like Baltimore, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Boston. His advice is for voters to pay more attention to “low visibility” local races (e.g., for district attorneys) to keep these “progressives” from gaining local power.