[qingcharles]

LOL. Police officers are never prosecuted. And do you know who is prosecuted even less? Prosecutors. And even less than that? Judges.

I think in all of history only one prosecutor was ever prosecuted for what is known in the USA as a "Brady violation", where the prosecutor hides exculpatory evidence from the defense, even though it routinely happens.

I tried repeatedly for many years to bring a prosecution against some cops and prosecutors for hacking offenses, but since there isn't really the concept of private prosecutions in the USA you have to rely on the prosecutor's office wanting to prosecute it's own. I even sued the prosecutor's office to try and enforce it, but the judge told me "Of course police officers are allowed to commit crimes in the course of an investigation." If I get bored at some point I will have the audio recordings pulled from the court and put them online so other people can see the insanity.

[Buttons840]

Best idea I've heard is that the public defenders office (or whatever, I'm not expert here) should be responsible for investigating and prosecuting police. There's already a natural opposition there. The current system works if people have infallible integrity (hint, they don't), this change would make the system work if people have human nature.

[Arrath]

The Public Defenders system is already chronically underfunded, understaffed, and far overworked. Sadly I don't think they would be the best avenue for trying to hold the police to account.

[justinclift]

Sounds like there needs to be something like "civil forfeiture" for the Public Defenders system, allowing them to seize the assets of suspected dishonest police and police departments.

Which they can then either keep, or sell off to raise funds for themselves.

[qingcharles]

This. They can't even defend the rights of the public because they are so overworked :(

[debatem1]

Public defenders would need resources akin to or larger than the prosecutor's office in order to take on this role. I don't know that there has ever been a time in America where the public cared more about defending the wrongly accused than convicting the genuinely guilty, but if there was it surely isn't now.

[Buttons840]

Yeah, sadly, I know your right. But for the sake of argument, the prosecutors office and the defenders office should be equally funded. It should be in the law that they are equally funded.

This makes sense, average people understand that attorneys defending a murderer aren't bad people, those attorneys are just doing their job and they play an important part of the legal system. Fewer think about the imbalance of resources and how that skews the results. It makes sense that examining both sides properly requires equal resources allocated to both sides.

As you say, it's a long shot, but it's an idea worth trying for. If nothing else, maybe people can remember to include it in the next government we form after the collapse (half joking).

[throwway120385]

If that happened in Washington I would love to know which judge so I can vote someone else in when the time comes.

[qingcharles]

Illinois. I wish I had the transcripts, but in civil court in the USA it's unusual as far as I'm aware to have a reporter transcribing. It is usually just recorded digitally, and then if there is an issue (e.g. appeal) the recordings are pulled and transcribed.

I'm assuming, without knowing, that I can have the recordings pulled without paying hundreds of dollars for transcripts. You can't FOIA judicial items in Illinois, but across the country you have a federal constitutional right to judicial items under the 1st Amendment.

[notjulianjaynes]

In Massachusetts (and presumably elsewhere) you can visit a website and pay $10 to get the "For the Record" audio recording emailed to you. You only need the docket number iirc.

[qingcharles]

Thank you, I'll look into this today.

[bombcar]

> LOL. Police officers are never prosecuted. And do you know who is prosecuted even less? Prosecutors. And even less than that? Judges.

At some point you have to have someone who is unprosecutable, or you have people who can be influenced.

The king, at the top of this heap, is the jury itself; they cannot be prosecuted for their decision, even if it is obviously, manifestly, completely, pants-on-head-insane.

[tialaramex]

No you don't, the current English King is named King Charles III. Did you ever wonder about the number?

Charles I was executed in 1649. He kept starting wars, Parliament told him to stop, he wouldn't so they tried him for Treason, he asserted that he necessarily couldn't commit treason because he was the King, but Parliament convicted him and sentenced him to death.

Parliament's rationale, then and now, is that their allegiance is to the Crown, a symbol of the country, not to some bloke who happens to be wearing it. He is just a temporary living symbol, even more replaceable than the (relatively expensive) metal object.

You can prosecute individual members of parliament too, this too isn't a hypothetical, if they're convicted of anything serious enough they automatically lose their seat and a replacement is elected, while for more minor offences like anybody else they might keep their jobs if they can suffer the embarrassment of everybody knowing they're a crook

Unlike in the US no individual holds a "pardon power" which could enable them to nullify a conviction, the Crown Power to do this is in practice exercised via a committee which investigates miscarriages of justice. Of course in principle a British Prime Minister could just insist they have this power anyway, and if a Parliament comprising largely of their party members goes along with it, so be it, on the other hand it's hard to see why the millions of British people who didn't vote for them should accept this, and it's not as though Britain hasn't had civil wars already.

[jfengel]

Two things:

1. The UK parliament reversed course and brought back Charles I's son to be Charles II. In doing to it executed a ton of people responsible for revolt. That included Oliver Cromwell -- despite the fact that he was already dead. They dug him up, tried him, convicted him, executed him, and put his head on a spike for decades. So it's not clear how much power that precedent could hold.

2. Charles III is King of the United Kingdom. The title of "King of England" was retired by Charles I's father. Charles I was King of Great Britain.

[tialaramex]

I don't know that I'd go so far as to say reversed course. Things didn't go well for Cromwell and the people who executed Charles I but also stuff didn't revert. Charles II is not a modern monarch but when Parliament does stuff he doesn't like he feels obliged to try to dodge that rather than defy them as his father did.

[jimz]

Prosecutors are absolutely immune. Brady violations only invalidate the underlying case and in really egregious cases, ruin future careers in politics, but it doesn't create criminal liability going the other way. Police have qualified immunity, prosecutors have absolute immunity, as long as the charge is something that constitutes their quotidian work.

Private prosecutions do exist, but not on a federal level, and anything falling under the purview of the CFAA - which is the umbrella that hangs over all computer-access-related crimes, is federal by definition. Besides, with parallel construction, they can always legally reverse-engineer a legally sound rationale that doesn't violate the 4th Amendment or what-have-you. However, while prosecutors are absolutely immune, the police are not and therefore are subject, occasionally, to federal-level liability either criminal or civil, although the prevalence of police perjury - testilying, as commonly known - is both an academic niche that has produced plenty of papers and have achieved virtually nothing in the real world. The term came into the public consciousness in 1994 and as late as 2018 I've heard it bandied about by cops in a courthouse. Prosecutors need the cops to investigate (public defenders' have a much smaller team of investigators if you're lucky, but even then anything technical is hopefully something you know enough about to find the right expert and conduct a competent cross examination. The police, of course, have the first mover advantage and so they can set up the fall guy who is already pension-eligible and move their assets out of their name before getting tossed in the gentlest way possible under the minivan. I wasn't involved with the case but the classic WA case involving the police using all of their tools available to rearrange the narrative surrounding a murder caught on camera and a federal prosecution is the Otto Zehm case. I had the luck to see what happened at sentencing and it was frankly sickening. https://www.spokesman.com/topics/otto-zehm/

So, police do get prosecuted, but only below the federal level, and extremely leniently, and if weren't for the video it probably wouldn't have happened. Ten years for a murder caught on video is crazy considering that the feds were giving out pleas of 8 years for "trafficking" 4 pills of Oxycodone before fent got into the supply (also thanks to the feds, as it was entirely supply driven) and ten years after leaving WA I still have former clients incarcerated for much more ambiguous fact patterns and convicted after multiple mistrials. As for the feds, now that Bivens is basically dead, even their own IG reports read like lurid crime novels written in the most lawyerly way possible. And if they're really in trouble, creating a moral panic always works. It had worked so far.

[qingcharles]

Just to note that prosecutors are not absolutely immune in all cases. They can be qualified immune, like officers.

For instance, in my case the prosecutor's office acted as law enforcement, e.g. they conducted investigations and conducted an arrest and executed a search warrant. In those cases, when they are acting in a nonprosecutorial role, and in a law enforcement role, they are definitely only qualified immune.

In Illinois it was ruled that prosecutors creating their own quasi-police departments is no longer legal. The advantage for the prosecutors was that they could bypass 99% of the laws and regulations that apply to police because they don't fit the statutory or regulatory definition of a police force.

Edit: Also to note, the CFAA has exemptions carved for law enforcement to do things that are criminal if done by the public:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

"(f)This section does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, or intelligence activity of a law enforcement agency of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State, or of an intelligence agency of the United States."

[noqc]

Whether or not a particular crime is one that the investigator is allowed to commit in the course of an investigation is extremely fact dependent, so the fact that you haven't included any is a little suspicious.

[qingcharles]

No, the legality of whether a law enforcement officer can "commit" a crime is based completely on statute.

Many statutes include exemptions for law enforcement. If there is no exemption, then it is a crime for the cops, the same as the public.

e.g. https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/documents/072000050K21...

"(d) This Section does not prevent any lawfully authorized investigative, law enforcement, protective, or intelligence gathering employee or agent of the State or federal government from operating any audiovisual recording device in any facility where a motion picture is being exhibited as part of lawfully authorized investigative, protective, law enforcement, or intelligence gathering activities."