[lazide]

‘It Depends’. It can be a valid defense that the law is not actually prosecuted normally and you’re being singled out. That would require proving however that the prosecutors did actually know of and refuse to prosecute most others.

‘Making an example of someone’ that they happen to catch (and being terrible at catching most people) is still perfectly fine however. So good luck with that.

[cmeacham98]

> It can be a valid defense that the law is not actually prosecuted normally and you’re being singled out.

My understanding is that in the US "singling out" specific criminals is perfectly OK for the prosecution to do (well, legally speaking, I'm not saying it's ethical or won't get them in trouble with voters).

(Again, given you aren't singling them out because of a protected class like race, sex, etc)

[lazide]

Again, ‘it depends’. You’re generally correct, but ‘bills of attainders’ laws (aka targeting specific individuals) along with the ‘equal protection before the law’ clauses make it unconstitutional to target specific individuals instead of classes of behavior, and that is the general theory behind it not being ok to do true selective enforcement (aka Bob gets charged for something Joe does openly all the time).

Like pointed out in a sibling thread though, essentially impossible to prove, let alone get anyone to care about, and useless as a defense unless someone is being stupidly blatant about it.

[tptacek]

Ken White (Popehat, a former prosecutor) and Josh Barro had a podcast for several years about the legal travails of the Trump administration, a theme of which might have been "you are never going to win a defense based on selective prosecution, just put it out of your mind."