| I contradicted your assertions I didn't make any of those assertions. Other people in this thread might have, but I didn't. it is not the prosecutor's job to question whether a law's penalties are in proportion to the crime it proscribes when deciding whether to bring a case. I didn't say it was. I agree that the prosecutor doesn't decide what the possible charges and punishments are; those are taken as given. But the prosecutor certainly does decide which cases to prosecute at all, and how aggressively to prosecute them. As I understand it, this case was prosecuted extremely aggressively. under what reasonable standard can a prosecutor be held personally responsible for the emotional state of the defendant? I didn't say he was (I realize others in this thread have, but I didn't); I agree he isn't. But that's irrelevant to whether or not this prosecution was way too aggressive for the actual harm done; IMO it was. The potential price of civil disobedience is that you will in fact end up punished for it. This is quite true. But it doesn't make the punishment fair or just. to say that the prosecutor abused her authority...runs counter to the very idea of a criminal justice system. Maybe it runs counter to the idea of a perfect criminal justice system, but the one we have is far from perfect, and prosecutors know that. In a perfect system, every instance of a given offense would be prosecuted the same, every defendant would get a fair chance to defend themselves, and we would have a reasonable expectation of a just outcome. In the system we have, because so many things have been criminalized, there are far more offenders of the letter of the law than can possibly be prosecuted, and defendants are at a huge disadvantage vs. the system. So who actually gets prosecuted, and what chance they have at a fair hearing, ends up being decided by the prosecutor's judgment, which is often colored by their personal beliefs or political leanings. Under those circumstances, IMO it is quite legitimate to question a prosecutor's judgment when a case is treated far more aggressively than seems warranted by the actual harm done. |