Are Federal Prosecutors Above the Law?

There is no more powerful person in the federal legal system than the federal prosecutor. Charging decisions and plea bargains effectively remove judges and juries from decisionmaking in most cases, and electing to fight a prosecutor rather than take the plea bargain most often results in dramatically longer sentences. This is how our system operates, and even if all the prosecutors are acting lawfully, defendants are at a massive disadvantage.But what if the prosecutor cheats a system that ’s already rigged in his favor?This is not a hypothetical question. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has proven itself incapable of holding prosecutors accountable for misconduct. Regardless of which party is in power, the DOJ has let prosecutors get away with inexcusable behavior that costs people their livelihoods, their reputations, and their freedom. Next week, we ’re holding an event to look at several high-profile cases in which the DOJ ran roughshod over individual rights, violated legal obligations and ethical norms, and ultimately held no one to account for their misdeeds.Join us Tuesday, November 7 at 4 p.m. forProsecutor Fallibility and Accountability, featuring Rob Cary, author of  Not Guilty: The Unlawful Prosecution of U.S. Senator Ted Stevens;  Howard Root, author of Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart-Stopping Years as a CEO on the Feds ’ Hit-List; and  Michael J. Daugherty, author of The Devil Inside the Beltway: The Shocking Expos é of the U.S. Government’s Surve...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs