29 Jan 2013 4:41 pm
Then WTH are you doing posting anything here?OF COURSE, it matters what you think,That's why I askedYou won't say because you support this selective enforcementYou don't believe in equality under the law, you only believe laws should matter to the little people.Frankly, that's disgustingThere is such a thing as prosecutorial discretion.Prosecutors make these kinds of choices all the time, even when it comes to 'the little people'.In this case the AG said, "Prosecution would not promote public safety in the District of Columbia, nor serve the best interests of the people."I just read a piece by William G. Otis, a law professor and former federal prosecutor who served as Special Counsel to President George H. W. Bush.He says it a lot better than I can.Why the Decision Not to Prosecute David Gregory Was CorrectIn a recent Sunday news show, NBC's David Gregory held up an empty ammunition clip to demonstrate to his guest, an NRA spokeman, the dangerousness of allowing people to possess a clip that can hold many (I think it was ten) bullets. As it happens, it was a clear violation of DC gun control law for Gregory to have the clip, empty or not. There ensued a heated debate about whether Gregory should have been prosecuted.Many on the pro-Second Amendment side (a side I generally agree with) thought that he should have been charged. They mocked the gun control crowd's flaunting the laws they so eagerly foist off on others. They derisively noted that Gregory got a free pass from the DC Attorney General, Irv Nathan, wondering whether Nathan, the same sort of liberal Democrat that Gregory certainly seems to be, would have been similarly deferential to, say, a pro-gun rights TV talk show host on Fox News who held up the same ammo clip.On the well-known conservative blog Legal Insurrection, I agreed that Nathan should have recused himself from the decision whether to prosecute Gregory. In my view, however, Nathan's substantive decision not to prosecute was correct. This provoked a firestorm of criticism from some of my fellow law-and-order conservatives. But, as I explain after the break, their criticism partakes of exactly the prosecution-as-politics ethos that, in the gun control debate as elsewhere, they correctly decry.The decision whether to prosecute a citizen of the United States should not be about making a point or showing the world that the potential defendant and his political cohorts are hypocrites. The power of the state to imprison a particular person is too fearsome to allow an individual defendant to be swept up in the general, and quite heated, debate about gun control or other controversial laws.A prosecutor needs to remember that his official function is to do justice in the individual case before him. Now what constitutes "justice" is not always so easy to discern, and that's what generates the heat. But in the Gregory case, the answer to that seemed pretty clear to me.Would a normal person consider David Gregory a criminal? Would he be leary about having him as a next door neighbor? About allowing his kids to go trick-or-treating at his house? About leaving a valuable package outside where he could see it?I doubt it. I've certainly seen no evidence of it.Given that, and given that a prosecutor's office does not have the resources to take every case it could (or anything close to every case), a decision has to be made about which ones to prosecute and which to leave behind. That decision should rest principally on which cases will do the most to advance public saftey.The idea that public safety would be advanced by putting Gregory in jail seems strained if not absurd. Thus, if one were to apply my proposed maximize-public-safety standard, the decision not to spend scarce tax dollars prosecuting Gregory seems correct, even simple.http://www.crimeandc...-to-prosec.htmlSo do you think that prosecuting David Gregory would advance public saftey?As far as laws only mattering when it comes to the little people, isn't that how it's always been?Rush Limbaugh was not prosecuted for the felony of doctor shopping, when prescription records showed that he had obtained over 2,000 pills within a few months.But another guy in Florida (Richard Paey) who suffered from multiple sclerosis and chronic pain from an automobile accident got 25 years in jail for the same crime.