The facts and law behind New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s successful prosecution of Donald Trump could be argued at length. But as a prosecutor for thirty years, I have been most interested in the ethics of prosecuting that case.
Outside the courthouse after the verdict, Trump said: “This was a shame.” That echoes comments made over the past year since his indictment in the case in which Trump repeatedly claimed the prosecution was “political persecution.”
There is merit in his point.
No one has better outlined the important ethical standards that have enabled state and federal prosecutors to maintain an image of integrity and honesty than Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. In a speech to the nation’s federal prosecutors on April 1, 1940, he noted that prosecutors should select cases in which the crime “is most egregious and causes the greatest harm to the public,” while warning that the prosecutor’s ability to to choose the “most dangerous”. current.”
Choosing defendants, Jackson said, requires judgment. It is a power that can be abused.
“Because the statute books are filled with a wide assortment of crimes, a prosecutor has a reasonable chance of finding a technical violation of some act by almost anyone,” Jackson said. In certain cases, he said, “it is not a matter of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who committed it, it is a matter of picking the man and searching the law books, or appointing investigators to work, to give him offense.”
It is when the prosecutor “picks someone he doesn’t like or wants to embarrass, or selects a group of unpopular people and then looks for a criminal offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecutorial power lies,” Jackson warned .
Our opinion: A criminal in the White House? After Trump’s conviction, voters must reflect on their values.
For years, as a federal prosecutor, I took pride in standing before juries and proclaiming, “Ron Sievert for the United States.” I believed that the majority of those in the courtroom understood that the federal government traditionally prosecuted the cases that were “the most egregious.” These were cases where, as Jackson said, “the public harm” was “the greatest.”
We prosecutors maintained our reputation for not prosecuting cases for political reasons by only prosecuting cases in which there were real victims, in the sense of physical injury or financial loss. The United States Department of Justice had an unwritten but long-understood policy of never indicting and trying a politician for a non-violent crime within a year of the election.
The prosecution of Donald Trump in New York can and has long been characterized by some as a “political prosecution” due to the strong belief that a case involving an allegedly false dossier would never have been filed if Trump had not run for president. .
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Judge Jackson warned that such a case, without an apparent victim, could undermine the public’s perception of the prosecutor’s legitimacy. This prosecution may have upset Trump, but the real question is: Will it damage the good faith – both in the United States and internationally – earned by American prosecutors for decades?
Ronald Sievert is an associate professor of government at Texas A&M University.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Don’t dismiss Trump’s claim that the district attorney is prosecuting him
