The Gavel Blog Archive A Letter from Anonymous Justice Employees
In 1940, then Attorney General Robert Jackson, who would go on to become a Supreme Court Justice and the chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, gave a speech to the United State Attorneys under his charge. Jackson is recognized as a man of great integrity and he had this to say about the role of the Prosecutor:
There can also be no doubt that to be closely identified with the intrigue, the money raising, and the machinery of a particular party or faction may present a prosecuting officer with embarrassing alignments and associations.
How prescient. He went on to enumerate one of the primary reasons a prosecutor must remain independent:
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 get, 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.
We must be able to trust that politicization is at a minimum discouraged if it can't be eradicated from the Justice department. After all we are talking about meeting out Justice, not doing the President's or a particular party's bidding. Cynics may say that we no longer live in the 1940s. To which I reply, true, but that doesn't mean Jackson was wrong.
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This may be a lil early to ask, but I'm curious. Who are you looking at (liking) for Prez in '08, so far? And why?
Thorne, It's early days yet. My initial reaction is Obama, but I am nervous at his inexperience and his liberalism. My second reaction is Giuliani. I want someone who has integrity, intelligence and moderation. Things for which we have been starved for the last eight years. JR
Posted by: Thorne | April 29, 2007 at 11:05 AM