District Attorney Quotes

Walking together, matching our footfalls, we exit the lobby like two television district attorneys gunning for justice.

I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.

any one who had listened to Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he heard Tholomyes in 1817. Only, Courfeyrac was an honourable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities of the exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholomyes was very great. The latent man which existed in the two was totally different in the first from what it was in the second. There was in Tholomyes a district attorney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin.

Who killed this man [Patrick Sonnier]? Nobody. Everybody can argue that he or she was just doing a job - the governor, the warden, the head of the Department of Corrections, the district attorney, the judge, the jury, the Pardon Board, the witnesses to the execution. Nobody feels personally responsible for the death of this man. (p. 101)

Modern states with democratic forms of government dispense with hereditary leviathans, but they have not found a way to dispense with inequalities of wealth and power backed up by an enormously complex system of criminal justice. Yet for 30,000 years after takeoff, life went on without kings, queens, prime ministers, presidents, parliaments, congresses, cabinets, governors, mayors, police officers, sheriffs, marshals, generals, lawyers, bailiffs, judges, district attorneys, court clerks, patrol cars, paddy wagons, jails, and penitentiaries. How did our ancestors manage to leave home without them?

All I know is that witnesses with vital evidence in the case are bad insurance risks.4 —New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, when asked about all the deaths of witnesses who had been sought for testimony.

The district attorneys were usually hand-picked incompetents designated by the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall Club, a group of party leaders who controlled nominations and elections in Manhattan, a Democratic stronghold.

Strange things began to happen that made Holmes’s claims about being the devil seem almost plausible. Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury foreman was electrocuted in a freak accident. The priest who delivered Holmes’s last rites was found dead on the grounds of his church of mysterious causes. The father of Emeline Cigrand was grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion. And a fire destroyed the office of District Attorney George Graham, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed.

Let’s just call it an adjustment of priorities.” Nick saw no reason to beat around the bush about this next part. Pallas was a good guy, and an excellent agent. “There’s more. You and I both know that Davis has been thinking about retiring. I told him today that when that happens, I’d like to be considered for the special agent in charge position. I wanted you to hear it from me first. Thought you might be eying the job, too.” Jack considered this. “I’ve given it some thought,” he admitted. “But politically, I doubt it would go over well if the special agent in charge of Chicago and the U.S. attorney of the same district were involved in a personal relationship.” His expression was one of pride. “And since Cameron got there first, it looks like I’m adjusting my priorities, too.” He paused. “Plus, I hear that people think I’m cranky.” He rubbed his jaw, musing. “Not sure why that is.” “Maybe it’s all the brooding and glowering.” “No one complains when you break out the don’t-fuck-with-me face.

I now think that was distanced me from Tricia and from the Rape Crisis Center was their use of generalities. I did not want to be one of a group or compared with others. It somehow blindsided my sense that I was going to survive. Tricia prepared me for failure by saying that it would be okay if I failed. She did this by showing me that the odds out there were against me. But what she told me, I didn't want to hear. In the face of dismal statistics regarding arrest, prosecution, and even full recovery for the victim, I saw no choice but to ignore the statistics. I needed what gave me hope, like being assigned a female assistant district attorney, not the news that the number of rape prosecutions in Syracuse for that calendar year had been nil.

As journalist Matt Taibbi recalls in his book The Divide: It’s become cliché by now, but since 2008, no high-ranking executive from any financial institution has gone to jail, not one, for any of the systemic crimes that wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. Even now, after JP Morgan Chase agreed to a settlement north of $13 billion for a variety of offenses.… the basic principle held true: nobody went to jail. Not one person. (...) On the one hand, he finds, “Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no charges”; on the other, the San Diego County District Attorney’s office conducts 26,000 warrantless, preemptive searches every year to make sure that welfare recipients really are exactly as poor as the poverty bureaucracy demands that they be.

downsized” by the District Attorney’s office, and when she offered her a job as Assistant General Counsel at Bostoff Securities, Janet literally jumped at the chance. “Janie! Come in, come in!

He was a district attorney in Pennsylvania. I was a writer on Cape Cod. We had been privates in the war, infantry scouts. We had never expected to make any money after the war, but we were doing quite well.

when authorities learned that Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it.

The National District Attorney’s Association Bulletin reported a revealing study that was conducted on another group of destructive men: child sexual abusers. The researcher asked each man whether he himself had been sexually victimized as a child. A hefty 67 percent of the subjects said yes. However, the researcher then informed the men that he was going to hook them up to a lie-detector test and ask them the same questions again. Affirmative answers suddenly dropped to only 29 percent. In other words, abusers of all varieties tend to realize the mileage they can get out of saying, “I’m abusive because the same thing was done to me.” Although

Number one, you’re black. Number two, a white man gonna say you shot him. Number three, you’re gonna have a white district attorney. Number four, you’re gonna have a white judge. And number five, you’re gonna have an all-white jury.

R.O.TC. kept me away from sports while the other guys practiced every day. They made the school teams, won their letters and got the girls. My days were spent mostly marching around in the sun. All you ever saw were the backs of some guy's ears and his buttocks. I quickly became disenchanted with military proceedings. The others shined their shoes brightly and seemed to go through maneuvers with relish. I couldn't see any sense in it. They were just getting shaped up in order to get their balls blown off later. On the other hand, I couldn't see myself crouched down in a football helmet, shoulder pads laced on, decked out in Blue and White, #69, trying to move out some brute with tacos on his breath so that the son of the district attorney could slant off left tackle for six yards. The problem was you had to keep choosing between on evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25, most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

As tight as it had been in the kitchen before they’d left, there were three times as many people crammed in there now, most of them men. Beverly’s mother was nowhere in sight and neither was the baby. Beverly was standing at the sink, a butcher’s knife in her hand. She was slicing oranges from an enormous pile that was sliding across the counter while the two lawyers from the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office, Dick Spencer and Albert Cousins—suit jackets off, ties off, and shirtsleeves rolled up high above the elbow—were twisting the halves of oranges on two metal juicers. Their foreheads were flushed and damp with sweat, their opened collars just beginning to darken, they worked as if the safety of their city relied on the making of orange juice.

Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice system—right here—through the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was about 150 new cases, 150 more pumping hearts and morose glares, every week that the courts and the Bronx County District Attorney's Office were open. And to what end? The same stupid, dismal, pathetic, horrifying crimes were committed day in and day out, all the same. What was accomplished by assistant D.A.'s, by any of them, through all this relentless stirring of the muck? The Bronx crumbled and decayed a little more, and a little more blood dried in the cracks. The Doubts! One thing was accomplished for sure. The system was fed, and those vans brought in the chow.

Yet in 1995, a few brave souls challenged the implementation of Georgia’s “two strikes and you’re out” sentencing scheme, which imposes life imprisonment for a second drug offense. Georgia’s district attorneys, who have unbridled discretion to decide whether to seek this harsh penalty, had invoked it against only 1 percent of white defendants facing a second drug conviction but against 16 percent of black defendants. The result was that 98.4 percent of those serving life sentences under the provision were black.

During voir dire, the interviews for jury selection, each person is asked under oath about their experience with the criminal justice system, as defendant or victim, but usually not even the most elementary effort is made to corroborate those claims. One ADA [Associate District Attorney] told me about inheriting a murder case, after the first jury deadlocked. He checked the raps for the jurors and found that four had criminal records. None of those jurors were prosecuted. Nor was it policy to prosecute defense witnesses who were demonstrably lying--by providing false alibis, for example--because, as another ADA told me, if they win the case, they don't bother, and if they lose, "it looks like sour grapes." A cop told me about a brawl at court one day, when he saw court officers tackle a man who tried to escape from the Grand Jury. An undercover was testifying about a buy when the juror recognized him as someone he had sold to. Another cop told me about locking up a woman for buying crack, who begged for a Desk Appearance Ticket, because she had to get back to court, for jury duty--she was the forewoman on a Narcotics case, of course. The worst part about these stories is that when I told them to various ADAs, none were at all surprised; most of those I'd worked with I respected, but the institutionalized expectations were abysmal. They were too used to losing and it showed in how they played the game.

Robert Rubin, a former Secretary of the United States Treasury, one of those who sign their names on the banknote you just used to pay for coffee, collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any check—he invoked uncertainty as an excuse. Heads he wins, tails he shouts “Black Swan.” Nor did Rubin acknowledge that he transferred risk to taxpayers: Spanish grammar specialists, assistant schoolteachers, supervisors in tin can factories, vegetarian nutrition advisors, and clerks for assistant district attorneys were “stopping him out,” that is, taking his risks and paying for his losses. But the worst casualty has been free markets, as the public, already prone to hating financiers, started conflating free markets and higher order forms of corruption and cronyism, when in fact it is the exact opposite: it is government, not markets, that makes these things possible by the mechanisms of bailouts. It is not just bailouts: government interference in general tends to remove skin in the game.

don’t forget about local elections. State legislatures have a huge influence on what you can and can’t do where you live; the mayor approves the city budget on things like police or school funding; your local district attorney has say over who goes to prison and who doesn’t. Local elections can even get your potholes filled, and I think we’re all anti-potholes. So do your research on the candidates just as you would for a president. Attend their speeches and debates when you can, call them out on issues of fairness and bias. Make them accountable to their records in a public forum.

Who killed Thursby?’ Spade said: ‘I don’t know.’ Bryan rubbed his black eyeglass-ribbon between thumb and fingers and said knowingly: ‘Perhaps you don’t, but you certainly could make an excellent guess.’ ‘Maybe, but I wouldn’t.’ The District Attorney raised his eyebrows. ‘I wouldn’t,’ Spade repeated. He was serene. ‘My guess might be excellent or it might be crummy, but Mrs Spade didn’t raise any children dippy enough to make guesses in front of a District Attorney, an Assistant District Attorney, and a stenographer.’ ‘Why shouldn’t you, if you’ve nothing to conceal?’ ‘Everybody,’ Spade responded mildly, ‘has something to conceal.’ ‘And you have – ?’ ‘My guesses, for one thing.

As requested by quite a mixture—the Police Commissioner and two of his deputies, the District Attorney, a bunch of inspectors and deputy inspectors, not to mention Sergeant Purley Stebbins. I’m talking from the private office of the Commissioner—you know it; you’ve been here. After these days and nights of camaraderie with them—is that the way to pronounce it?” “Almost.” “Good. I am held in high esteem by the whole shebang, from Commissioner all the way down to Lieutenant Rowcliff, which is quite a distance. Wanting to show me what they think of me, they are bestowing a great honor on me. Having a request to make of you, they are letting me make it. They’re all sitting here gazing at me so tenderly I’ve got a lump in my throat. You ought to see them.

And outside Watts, a dozen more shootings produce a dozen more weeping families that have to struggle stoically through their black grief or that can stand behind microphones and declare their black anger, and the bodies pile higher and higher and higher, and so does the frustration with the impunity 'because,' says the district attorney in St. Louis in Kansas City in Staten Island in Dayton in Gary in Albuquerque in Oakland, 'you can’t indict an algorithm.

Sam Temple was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Los Angeles, where there were specialists there in burn injuries. He wasn’t consulted: he was found on his knees, obviously in shock, extensively burned. EMTs took over. Astrid Ellison was taken to a hospital in Santa Barbara, as was Diana Ladris. Other kids were shared out among half a dozen hospitals. Some specialized in plastic surgery, others in the effects of starvation. Over the next week all were seen by psychiatrists once their immediate physical injuries were addressed. Lots of psychiatrists. And when they weren’t being seen by psychiatrists, they were being seen by FBI agents, and California Highway Patrol investigators, and lawyers from the district attorney’s office. The consensus seemed to be that a number of the Perdido survivors, as they were now known, would be prosecuted for crimes ranging from simple assault to murder. First on that list was Sam Temple.

The mob took over South Street that warm Saturday night, the first of spring, as though popping up from nowhere, witnesses said. It seemed to be following the patterns of three similar mobs that had quickly assembled in Center City on March 3, Feb. 16, and Dec. 18. “They had smiles on their faces as they scared people at random,” Assistant District Attorney Angel Flores said in an interview with The Inquirer a week after the March 20 attacks. “They thought that assaulting others was a form of enjoyment.

He then, again by way of reference to legal precedent and authority, reminded the District Attorney’s Office that it was charged with grave responsibilities which demanded integrity, zeal, and conscientious effort in the gathering and presentation of evidence. He quoted the American Bar Association’s standards for prosecutors: “In making the decision to prosecute, the prosecutor should give no weight to the personal or political advantages or disadvantages which might be involved or to a desire to enhance his or her record of convictions.

But I am no Lord of the Hill; these hands pitching fastballs at glass houses are just as dirty as yours are. However, there are a lot of exemptions in my favor. One, much of my calamitous behavior occurred prior to the Digital Age, so no footage or real proof exists (thank fuck) and can only be found in hearsay and interviews. Two, I understand the difference between “getting it out of your system” when you are young and not giving a shit outright about making buffoonery seem like a career and not an aberration as you get old enough to actually know better. Three—and this is most important—it is my book, so I can do no wrong. Shit happens; it just so happens to be yours and not mine. So guess what? Even if you are not devoid of gray matter, even if you are not technically by definition bereft of intuitive mental faculties, you are all guilty by association. This is a RICO case, and I am the district attorney in charge of bringing justice to the world. I may not be infallible, but I can wear a suit and use big words, and it won’t even look like someone put peanut butter on the roof of my mouth.

He complained that his new job took him away from his ranch too much. His wife complained even more, but the truth of the matter was that nothing much had happened in a criminal way since Horace had been deputy. He had seen himself making a name for himself and running for sheriff. The sheriff was an important officer. His job was less flighty than that of district attorney, almost as permanent and dignified as superior court judge. Horace didn’t want to stay on the ranch all his life, and his wife had an urge to live in Salinas where she had relatives.

The Defendant: I am pleading guilty your honors but I'm doing it because I think it would be a waste of money to have a trial over five dollars worth of crack. What I really need is a drug program because I want to turn my life around and the only reason I was doing what I was doing on the street was to support my habit. The habit has to be fed your honors as you know and I believe in working for my money. I could be out there robbing people but I'm not and I've always worked even though I am disabled. And not always at this your honors, I used to be a mail carrier back in the day but then I started using drugs and that was all I wanted to do. So I'm taking this plea to save the city of New York and the taxpayers money because I can't believe that the DA, who I can see is a very tall man, would take to trial a case involving five dollars worth of crack, especially knowing how much a trial of that nature would cost. But I still think that I should get a chance to do a drug program because I've never been given that chance in any of my cases and the money that will be spent keeping me in jail could be spent addressing my real problem which is that I like, no need, to smoke crack every day and every chance I get, and if I have to point people to somebody who's selling the stuff so I can get one dollar and eventually save up enough to buy a vial then smoke it immediately and start saving up for my next one that I'll gladly do that, and I'll do it even though I know it could land me in jail for years because the only thing that matters at that moment is getting my next vial and I am not a Homo-sapiens-sexual your honors but if I need money to buy crack I will suck. . . .

A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives. And yet in many walks of life, we find otherwise normal men and women caught in the same trap and busily making the world much less good than it could be. Elected officials ignore long-term problems because they must pander to the short-term interests of voters. People working for insurance companies rely on technicalities to deny desperately ill patients the care they need. CEOs and investment bankers run extraordinary risks—both for their businesses and for the economy as a whole—because they reap the rewards of success without suffering the penalties of failure. District attorneys continue to prosecute people they know to be innocent because their careers depend on winning cases. Our government fights a war on drugs that creates the very problem of black-market profits and violence that it pretends to solve. We need systems that are wiser than we are. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us more honest and ethical than we tend to be. The project of building them is distinct from—and, in my view, even more important than—an individual’s refining his personal ethical code.

I also was proud to represent John Thompson, a Louisiana man who had been wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Two of my partners had represented Thompson pro bono for decades, and they had uncovered DNA evidence that proved his innocence. Tragically, the Louisiana district attorney’s office had deliberately suppressed the DNA evidence, and Thompson spent eighteen years of his life imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. He was released, and he subsequently sued the DA’s office for their wrongful conduct. A jury awarded him $14 million, and I helped represent Thompson on appeal.

Eleven stories above Brooklyn Heights in a 659,000-square-foot building that also housed Morgan Stanley and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, Hillary’s top aides were as miserable as midlevel bureaucrats in an agency with no clear plans for how to attain its mission. They

What really happened to JonBenet Ramsey? Was her death intentional or an accident, covered up to look like a botched kidnapping? What are the facts about the case DNA? What does it really tell us? Is it relevant to the crime or is it contamination? Can it be tied to an intruder, or was Mary Lacy’s attempt at exoneration of the Ramseys based on faulty interpretation of the actual lab results? “Listen Carefully: Truth and Evidence in the JonBenet Ramsey Case” contains 16 pages of explosive DNA reports from Bode Cellmark Forensics that had been hidden until recently, as well details of the 2013 shocking revelation John and Patsy Ramsey were indicted by a Grand Jury in 1999, but the district attorney declined to prosecute. Exposing the many myths and misrepresentations of facts in the Ramsey case, the book uses documented evidence and detailed research, as well as extensive interviews with many who were involved in the case, to present the truth surrounding JonBenet’s death and the 20-year investigation. With a thorough linguistic analysis of the ransom note, as well as handwriting comparisons, crime-scene photos, footnotes, a bibliography for further reading and five appendices (including timelines, Ramsey house plans, and a guide to understanding DNA), the book is essential for anyone interested not only what happened to JonBenet, but why.

My client comes into the courtroom with baggage because we do not have the presumption of innocence in America. Truth is, we have the assumption of guilt, and it starts the minute somebody is arrested. Nobody says “an innocent person was arrested today on suspicion of murder.” What happens is the Chief of Police, the District Attorney, and everybody else who is looking to get on television has a press conference and says “We have solved a crime. We have arrested and have in custody the person who did it. He will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” And then a lawyer comes along at some point and either says “no comment” or “my client’s not guilty,” but nobody believes, so my job as a lawyer is to try to level the playing field.

The deference that politicians, police, and prosecutors showed the Catholic Church (to which most of them belonged) mirrored a deference shown in the wider society. But the extent of the sexual abuse that spilled out after the Geoghan case, especially the Church’s efforts to buy the silence of the victims, shook to the core even the most devout Catholics in law enforcement and politics. A culture of deference that had taken more than a century to evolve seemed to erode in a matter of weeks. In other parts of the United States, there was a similar change in the way secular power viewed Church authorities. On Long Island, in Cincinnati, and in Philadelphia, district attorneys convened grand juries to investigate the role Church officials may have played in the scandal. Many

What is the trick for writing dialogue? That you are not running a wiretap for the FBI. I used to have a boyfriend who was an assistant District Attorney in narcotics in New York and he used to have to read wiretaps. And he would bring them home, three feet high, two women who were watching television in their separate apartments, saying, “I need Pampers! Do you have Pampers? Did you see what he just did on that show?” Four thousand pages. They were girlfriends of suspects and it was a real cautionary tale in how you don’t want people to go on and on. And dialogue is nothing at all like how people talk. Dialogue, hopefully, if you’re doing it well, is a couple of well-chosen kernels that stand in for conversation, that represent conversation. Conversation is very boring. Even interesting conversations.

Just one,” Nora said. “But this is just a theory, isn’t it?” “Call it any name you like. It’s good enough for me.” “But I thought everybody was supposed to be considered innocent until they were proved guilty and if there was any reasonable doubt, they—” “That’s for juries, not detectives. You find the guy you think did the murder and you slam him in the can and let everybody know you think he’s guilty and put his picture all over newspapers, and the District Attorney builds up the best theory he can on what information you’ve got and meanwhile you pick up additional details here and there, and people who recognize his picture in the paper—as well as people who’d think he was innocent if you hadn’t arrested him—come in and tell you things about him and presently you’ve got him sitting on the electric chair.

Because Jason was 17, the district court judge was sitting as a juvenile judge. And because Jason was 17, the courtroom was closed to spectators. Jason was wearing the brand-new blazer and tie his mother had bought him for college interviews. He'd gotten a haircut. His attorney had made sure of that, said sometimes a judge's decisions could hinge on something as frivolous as whether or not he could see your eyes.

Why? Why do the authorities allow the criminal gangs that terrorize neighborhoods and entire cities to thrive as they do? Politicians, attorneys general, district attorneys, and the FBI have the power to destroy the gangs and prevent most of the crimes they commit, the murdering and raping and human trafficking and the endless flood of drugs across the border, the hateful murdering murdering murdering of faithful husbands and little girls in their Sunday dresses. Yet the people with the power to stop men like Hamal and Lupo and Parker often facilitate their activities. Maybe the majority of politicians and their appointees are corrupt, but not all. Are those uncorrupted individuals so often ineffective because they are cowards or lazy or stupid? Does loyalty to party, class, club, or ideology matter to them more than doing what is right? Why? Why can’t such people see that the crime and anarchy they permit to flourish in poor and middle-class neighborhoods will eventually metastasize into the enclaves of the elite where they live their privileged lives? Why do they have contempt for those not in their circle? Why can’t they see that being of the people rather than ruling over them is the only way that they themselves will survive?

Using Holmes’s instructions, workmen in the employ of undertaker John J. O’Rourke filled a coffin with cement, then placed Holmes’s body inside and covered it with more cement. They hauled him south through the countryside to Holy Cross Cemetery, a Catholic burial ground in Delaware County, just south of Philadelphia. With great effort they transferred the heavy coffin to the cemetery’s central vault, where two Pinkerton detectives guarded the body overnight. They took turns sleeping in a white pine coffin. The next day workers opened a double grave and filled this too with cement, then inserted Holmes’s coffin. They placed more cement on top and closed the grave. “Holmes’ idea was evidently to guard his remains in every way from scientific enterprise, from the pickling vat and the knife,” the Public Ledger reported. Strange things began to happen that made Holmes’s claims about being the devil seem almost plausible. Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury foreman was electrocuted in a freak accident. The priest who delivered Holmes’s last rites was found dead on the grounds of his church of mysterious causes. The father of Emeline Cigrand was grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion. And a fire destroyed the office of District Attorney George Graham, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed.

Questions surround nearly every aspect of the assassination. The chain of possession regarding each piece of evidence was tainted beyond repair. The presidential limousine, which represented the literal crime scene, was taken over by officials immediately after JFK’s body was carried into Parkland Hospital and tampered with. The Secret Service apparently cleaned up the limousine, washing away crucial evidence in the process. Obviously, whatever bullet fragments or other material that was purportedly found there became immediately suspect because of this. On November 26, the windshield on the presidential limo was replaced. The supposed murder weapon—a cheap, Italian Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a defective scope, allegedly ordered by Oswald through a post office box registered to his purported alias, Alex Hidell—is similarly troublesome. The two Dallas officers who discovered the rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, Seymour Weitzman and Eugene Boone, both swore in separate affidavits that the weapon was a German Mauser. As was to become all too common in this case, they would later each claim to be “mistaken” in a curiously identical manner. In fact, as late as midnight on November 22, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade would refer to the rifle as a Mauser when speaking to the press. Local WFAA television reported the weapon found as both a German Mauser and an Argentine Mauser. NBC, meanwhile, described the weapon as a British Enfield. In an honest court, the Carcano would not even have been permitted into the record, because no reliable chain of possession for it existed. Legally speaking, the rifle found on the sixth floor was a German Mauser, and no one claimed Oswald owned a weapon of that kind.

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth. I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America. I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America. I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America. I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America. I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America. I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America. I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America. I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America. I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America. These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions. And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life. Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17

Stanley Perlman. She hurried out of the building at One Market Plaza, stepped off the curb, and hailed a cab. It occurred to her, as it always did, that one of these days when she met with him, it would really be for the last time. He always said it was. She had begun to expect him to live forever, despite his protests, and in spite of the realities of time. Her law firm had handled his affairs for more than half a century. She had been his estate and tax attorney for the past three years. At thirty-eight, Sarah had been a partner of the firm for the past two years, and had inherited Stanley as a client when his previous attorney died. Stanley had outlived them all. He was ninety-eight years old. It was hard to believe sometimes. His mind was as sharp as it had ever been, he read voraciously, and he was well aware of every nuance and change in the current tax laws. He was a challenging and entertaining client. Stanley Perlman had been a genius in business all his life. The only thing that had changed over the years was that his body had betrayed him, but never once his mind. He was bedridden now, and had been for nearly seven years. Five nurses attended to him, three regularly in eight-hour shifts, two as relief. He was comfortable, most of the time, and hadn't left his house in years. Sarah had always liked and admired him, although others thought he was irascible and cantankerous. She thought he was a remarkable man. She gave the cabdriver Stanley's Scott Street address. They made their way through the downtown traffic in San Francisco's financial district, and headed west uptown, toward Pacific Heights, where he had lived in the same house for seventy-six years. The sun was shining brightly as they climbed Nob Hill up California Street, and she knew it might be otherwise when they got uptown. The fog often sat heavily on the residential

NBC News reporter David Gregory was on a tear. Lecturing the NRA president—and the rest of the world—on the need for gun restrictions, the D.C. media darling and host of NBC’s boring Sunday morning gabfest, Meet the Press, Gregory displayed a thirty-round magazine during an interview. This was a violation of District of Columbia law, which specifically makes it illegal to own, transfer, or sell “high-capacity ammunition.” Conservatives demanded the Mr. Gregory, a proponent of strict gun control laws, be arrested and charged for his clear violation of the laws he supports. Instead the District of Columbia’s attorney general, Irv Nathan, gave Gregory a pass: Having carefully reviewed all of the facts and circumstances of this matter, as it does in every case involving firearms-related offenses or any other potential violation of D.C. law within our criminal jurisdiction, OAG has determined to exercise its prosecutorial discretion to decline to bring criminal charges against Mr. Gregory, who has no criminal record, or any other NBC employee based on the events associated with the December 23, 2012 broadcast. What irked people even more was the attorney general admitted that NBC had willfully violated D.C. law. As he noted: No specific intent is required for this violation, and ignorance of the law or even confusion about it is no defense. We therefore did not rely in making our judgment on the feeble and unsatisfactory efforts that NBC made to determine whether or not it was lawful to possess, display and broadcast this large capacity magazine as a means of fostering the public policy debate. Although there appears to have been some misinformation provided initially, NBC was clearly and timely advised by an MPD employee that its plans to exhibit on the broadcast a high capacity-magazine would violate D.C. law. David Gregory gets a pass, but not Mark Witaschek. Witaschek was the subject of not one but two raids on his home by D.C. police. The second time that police raided Witaschek’s home, they did so with a SWAT team and even pulled his terrified teenage son out of the shower. They found inoperable muzzleloader bullets (replicas, not live ammunition, no primer) and an inoperable shotgun shell, a tchotchke from a hunting trip. Witaschek, in compliance with D.C. laws, kept his guns out of D.C. and at a family member’s home in Virginia. It wasn’t good enough for the courts, who tangled him up in a two-year court battle that he fought on principle but eventually lost. As punishment, the court forced him to register as a gun offender, even though he never had a firearm in the city. Witaschek is listed as a “gun offender”—not to be confused with “sex offender,” though that’s exactly the intent: to draw some sort of correlation, to make possession of a common firearm seem as perverse as sexual offenses. If only Mark Witaschek got the break that David Gregory received.

worst that can happen if I refuse to pay up, and these blackmailers turn their records over to the District Attorney?

It has since you and Clancy got me in this job,” Corker said. “Who’s Brewer fighting?” “I told you earlier. Harley Shaker.” “Right. The bricklayer from Newport.” “Yeah.” “I’ve seen Shaker fight. Ain’t ever seen him lose.” “Should be interesting,” Penn said. “The gate looks pretty good today.” “Be more than thirty thousand dollars. Once we figure up the vig on the bets, we should have a real good day.” Corker heard footsteps coming up the back stairs and turned to see Stephen Morris, the district attorney, walk into the room. Morris was wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt. “And there stands the last man I expected to see here today,” Corker said. “What brings you out to our little playground?” “Have you heard about Darren Street?” Morris said. “The lawyer? The guy everybody thinks has killed a few folks and gotten away with it?” “That’s him,” Morris said. “I think he just killed another one, but that’s not the big problem.” “What is the big problem?” “Can we have the room?” Morris said to

My theory? I don’t really have one, but if I did, it would probably be along the lines of he knew a huge lawsuit would be coming down the pike and that the medical licensing board would be taking a close look at him, so he ran away to avoid the beating he knew he was about to take.” “So you don’t think any harm has come to him?” “I don’t know, Senator, but if harm did come to him, it couldn’t have come to a more deserving person.” “So Elizabeth tells me you’d like to be the next district attorney general in Knoxville,” Senator Tate said. “Tell me, if you don’t mind, why you would want such a dirty job.” He spoke with a slow mountain drawl, a baritone that was almost mesmerizing. It was the kind of voice that could hypnotize an unsuspecting

Now, see, how would you know that?” Jay says. “Last I checked, grand jury testimony is sealed. Hell, I won’t even see it till discovery. So unless you’re prepared to admit to having an inside track to the district attorney’s office, the head of which you just so happen to be backing in the mayor’s race, I don’t see how you could know the details of what went on in that grand jury room.

Plaintiff was required to furnish a complete answer to Interrogatory No. 1, about the names of comparably situated personnel. He signed the answers under oath. If his answer truly did not “scratch the surface” of the names and facts known to him, Plaintiff’s answer is perjury. United States District Court District Of Minnesota Michael Brodkorb, Plaintiff, v. Minnesota Senate, Defendant. File No. 12-CV-01958 (SRN/AJB) Defendant’s Memorandum Of Law In Support Of Motion For Rule 37 Sanctions. Case No. 0:12-cv-01958-SRN-AJB Document 74 Filed 08/15/13 Page 16 of 23 Respectfully submitted, Dated: August 15, 2013. Dayle Nolan & Christopher J. Harristhal Attorneys for Defendant

I had heard of this Frisbie, an Assistant District Attorney, but had never seen him. I observed, when he entered, that I hadn’t missed much. He was the window-dummy type—high collar, clothes pressed very nice, and embalmed stiff and cold. The only thing you could tell from his eyes was that his self-esteem almost hurt him.

Thad, did she come over?” said Quentin Erwin, Jr., the Hickam County District Attorney and Thaddeus Murfee’s best friend. “I sent her to see you because I sure as hell didn’t know what to do with her. Great tits, though, huh?” Quentin loved raunchy cases like Ermeline’s.

A short man who himself had been an attorney before becoming a broadcast journalist shouted, “Jonathan? Is it true that evidence found in the house exculpates Theodore Martin in the murder of his wife?” Jonathan smiled benignly. “I’ve seen the evidence that Mr. Cole found, and I’ll be in consultation with the district attorney’s office sometime in the next few days. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” More questions exploded at us from a dozen directions, and they were all about Mr. Cole.

In 2013, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was fined $375,000 by the Federal Election Commission for violating federal disclosure laws. An FEC audit of the 2008 records of Obama for America found the group failed to disclose millions of dollars in contributions and delayed refunding millions more in excess contributions.8 Excess contributions—sound familiar? But the FEC, you see, is a bipartisan group with an equal number of Democratic and Republican commissioners. As a consequence of both parties having a say, FEC decisions tend to be more balanced. My case, you may remember, was deliberately not referred to the FEC, as such cases typically are. Rather, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York decided to go ahead and prosecute it. Unlike Obama, I did not benefit from a scheme involving millions of dollars in excess contributions; rather, I paid $20,000 in excess of the campaign finance limit. Yet I ended up in a confinement center, and Obama, for vastly more serious offenses, paid a token fine.

He showed no favoritism to the district attorney’s office, which was also unusual,

ORDER: Defendant’s motion to prohibit the District Attorney from committing prosecutorial misconduct is denied. Judicial

Blair Hanquist had started out as a laughable candidate for district attorney, a mere pile of dried dog poop on the path to Sawyer White’s third four-year term in office.

It's kind of funny to me listening to [prosecutors] who claim to have these great records of winning a hundred and some odd straight felony cases without a loss and that kind of stuff that you hear of all the time. I'm here to tell you, if you let me pick out which hundred cases I get to try, I'll win a hundred of them in a row too. Case selection is everything in creating records like that. My philosophy was, I tried them all. If I made a determination that the evidence was sufficient to justify the prosecution, then I would try the case, and certainly whenever you do that, you're going to lose a certain percentage of them.

… and while I had been helping Wolfe get the orchids primped up I had been accosted by a tall skinny guy in a pin-check suit, as young as me or younger, wearing a smile that I would recognize if I saw it in Siam—the smile of an elected person who expects to run again, or a novice in training to join the elected person class at the first opportunity. He looked around to make sure no spies were sneaking up on us at the moment, introduced himself as Mr. Whosis, Assistant District Attorney of Crowfield County, and told me at the bottom of his voice, shifting from the smile to Expression 9B, which is used when speaking of the death of a voter, that he would like to have my version of the unfortunate occurrence at the estate of Mr. Pratt the preceding evening. Feeling pestered, I raised my voice instead of lowering it. “District Attorney, huh? Working up a charge of murder against the bull?” That confused him, because he had to show that he appreciated my wit without sacrificing Expression 9B…

the onerous part of being the district attorney was putting up with an exploitative and sensationalizing media and dealing with a myriad of special-interest groups, all of whom thought they were being ignored, or discriminated against, or deserved more, and all of whom knew that they could do his job better than he could. He was also tired of watching incompetent judges and ethically challenged lawyers make a mockery of the system.

But then the tabloids began to publish their stories about Gutierrez’s supposed past as a prostitute. And the office of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. began to raise the same points.

David Boies had also worked on the Gutierrez imbroglio, and also kept the Manhattan district attorney close. He’d been a longtime donor. He would give $10,000 to Vance’s reelection campaign in the months following the decision not to press charges.

Years ago, I received a call from a paramedic I had known for a long, long time. He was a true believer; a provider in it to do good more than to do well. By the tone of his voice, I could tell he was in some serious trouble. His voice did not lie. He was. It seemed that some years earlier he had suffered an injury off the job. The injury resulted in several surgeries and months of painful recovery, physical rehabilitation, and pain medicine. It started as an as-needed remedy for intense pain but before long became a physical necessity. When the actual pain no longer necessitated the monthly refills, the feigned pain took over. When that excuse had run its course, new injuries and favors from friends took over. The cycle had begun. Back at work, he became adept at leading his double life; on the job he was clean, sober, and clear-headed, but off-duty the pills took over. The decline was slow, but steady. It would not be long before he would lose all control. One day, on a call with the entire crew, he found himself in the home of a patient whose medicine cupboard was a veritable treasure trove of pain killing goodies. Jackpot! While logging all of the medicines, it was easy to drop a full bottle of a certain pain killer into his pocket, and he did…completely undetected. The patient was transported, and the scene was cleared, and his addiction would be fed for a little while longer. Nobody would ever know. However, as he exited the scene with his supervisor, he was struck with a blunt and harsh realization: This is not who I am and it’s not who I want to be! While still at the curbside, in front of the patient’s home, he pulled the bottle from his pocket, handed it to his supervisor, and admitted sincerely: “I have a problem. I need help.” His supervisor considered the heartfelt and painfully honest plea for help, but the paramedic was summarily fired from a job where he had an impeccable record of exemplary service for nearly two decades. He was stripped of his Paramedic license and reported to local authorities and was charged with multiple felonies by the District Attorney. That was the response from his supervisor and the rest of the morally superior lemmings up the chain of command. He asked for help, and they fucked him…because they were afraid of what actually helping him might look like to the outside world. Not once was he offered treatment or an ounce of compassion. He asked for help; now he was looking at serious prison time. This brings us to the frightened and helpless tone in his voice when he called me. Thankfully, his story ends with the proper treatment: A new career and the entire criminal case being dismissed (he had a great lawyer). Unfortunately, similar stories continue to play out in agencies, both public and private, all across America and they do not, or will not, end so well.

keep the negro out of jail. He is thereupon taken away and begins what is frequently a long term of cruel servitude, being frequently whipped for failure to perform work to the satisfaction of his employer. An agent of the secret service who is now on the ground will make a thorough investigation of the whole alleged system and turn over to the United States Attorney of that district all information he may secure with a view to the prosecution of said offenders. 1

It's kind of funny to me listening to people who claim to have these great records of winning a hundred and some odd straight felony cases without a loss and that kind of stuff that you hear of all the time. I'm here to tell you, if you let me pick out which hundred cases I get to try, I'll win a hundred of them in a row, too. Case selection is everything in creating records like that. My philosophy was, I tried them all. If I made a determination that the evidence was sufficient to justify the prosecution, then I would try the case, and certainly whenever you do that, you're going to lose a certain percentage of them.

There are very few reasons for identity theft, Ellie. One is to profit from the victim’s bank accounts. The other is to hide who you really are because who you really are is not lawful. Since Dr. Gunterson never suspected his identity was borrowed, I assume there was no theft. I bet our Arnie has priors. He’s done something wrong somewhere and needs to be someone else. And if he’s hiding, he’s probably hiding from the police. And if he’s hiding from the police, there are probably warrants. And if there are warrants, I believe it would serve our purpose to let him be arrested.” Brie lifted an eyebrow. “Hmm?” “Wow,” Ellie said. “I should have known. If he’s nothing but a criminal, shouldn’t I have known?” Brie shook her head. “I can’t answer that one for you, Ellie. I spent years in the district attorney’s office in Sacramento, prosecuting crimes like this. I met a lot of very intelligent women who were victimized by manipulative men, as well as perfectly sharp men taken for a wild ride by clever, dishonest women. It’s a con, and you were at a vulnerable time in your life. Cons can smell that a mile away. Sadly, it’s common in the world of criminal law.” “Can

In the United States, matters have not yet progressed this far, but we must remain vigilant. Some Muslims, such as Imam Rauf, who tried to erect the Ground Zero Mosque, argue that Sharia law is compatible with the U.S. Constitution.50 Make no mistake, he is not saying the Constitution and Sharia are similar; rather he wants to amend the Constitution, to fundamentally alter our government from one that allows freedom to flourish to one that squelches liberty in the name of Sharia. We cannot allow this. Andrew McCarthy, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, says, What I think the imam means about this is that there are mechanisms within the Constitution [such as amendments] that can be exploited to completely change the Constitutional system. . . . If laws get enacted, or if litigation is brought in courts, the Sharia agenda can be advanced. So he sees in our Constitution the sort of loopholes and mechanisms that he can use to advance Sharia, in that sense it’s Sharia-compliant.51 The practice of advancing jihad by implementing Sharia is perhaps one of the most strategically coordinated and far-reaching politico-religious agendas in the world today, and Americans must recognize it in order to protect America from such laws. This chapter examines some fundamental principles of Sharia and then considers how American legal principles differ in significant ways.

room full of strangers as a five-year-old. She was much older now – a professional with a law degree to boot, and, until recently, with a successful career at the District Attorney’s office, but today

He was also a burglar and an informant and his one great fear was coming to trial and being sentenced to time at the state prison in Folsom. Several of his ex-associates were there, thanks to his help. I had just been granted a further continuance of his trial, delaying it for another sixty days. Our strategy was to string out his case as long as possible so that when he inevitably pled guilty he would be credited with the time he served in county jail and avoid Folsom altogether. The district attorney’s office was cooperative; the least they owed him was county time—easy time, the prisoners called it. County was relatively un-crowded and the sheriffs relatively benign. On the other hand, county stank like every other jail I’d ever been in.

By the end of February, nearly one hundred residents of New York were dead, killed by redistilled industrial alcohols. Brooklyn district attorney John Ruston said that the poisoned alcohol came from steamers, from rum runners in smaller boats, and as always from Brooklyn, that well-known home of creative alcohol reengineering.

Stabbings, shooting, rapes, homicides -- the denizens of places like the Elk brought those crimes along with them the way ordinary travelers carried luggage.

Police: NY bus driver drove drunk with 35 students on board CORTLANDT, N.Y. (AP) — Police say a school bus driver was driving drunk with 35 students on board when she sideswiped a utility pole in suburban New York. It happened Monday as 56-year-old Mary Coletti was taking students to Walter Panas High School in Cortdandt. Authorities say she sideswiped the pole around 7 a.m. They say her blood-alcohol level was above the legal limit of .08 percent. A few students suffered minor injuries. Lakeland School District Superintendent George Stone tells The Journal News Coletti's bus driver's license has been revoked. Coletti was arraigned Monday and sent to jail on $1,000 bail. She's due back in court May 18. It's unclear if she has an attorney. Posted:

When she’s in a courtroom, Wendy Patrick, a deputy district attorney for San Diego, uses some of the roughest words in the English language. She has to, given that she prosecutes sex crimes. Yet just repeating the words is a challenge for a woman who not only holds a law degree but also degrees in theology and is an ordained Baptist minister. “I have to say (a particularly vulgar expletive) in court when I’m quoting other people, usually the defendants,” she admitted. There’s an important reason Patrick has to repeat vile language in court. “My job is to prove a case, to prove that a crime occurred,” she explained. “There’s often an element of coercion, of threat, (and) of fear. Colorful language and context is very relevant to proving the kind of emotional persuasion, the menacing, a flavor of how scary these guys are. The jury has to be made aware of how bad the situation was. Those words are disgusting.” It’s so bad, Patrick said, that on occasion a judge will ask her to tone things down, fearing a jury’s emotions will be improperly swayed. And yet Patrick continues to be surprised when she heads over to San Diego State University for her part-time work of teaching business ethics. “My students have no qualms about dropping the ‘F-bomb’ in class,” she said. “The culture in college campuses is that unless they’re disruptive or violating the rules, that’s (just) the way kids talk.” Experts say people swear for impact, but the widespread use of strong language may in fact lessen that impact, as well as lessen society’s ability to set apart certain ideas and words as sacred. . . . [C]onsider the now-conversational use of the texting abbreviation “OMG,” for “Oh, My God,” and how the full phrase often shows up in settings as benign as home-design shows without any recognition of its meaning by the speakers. . . . Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert in San Antonio, in a blog about workers cleaning up their language, cited a 2012 Career Builder survey in which 57 percent of employers say they wouldn’t hire a candidate who used profanity. . . . She added, “It all comes down to respect: if you wouldn’t say it to your grandmother, you shouldn’t say it to your client, your boss, your girlfriend or your wife.” And what about Hollywood, which is often blamed for coarsening the language? According to Barbara Nicolosi, a Hollywood script consultant and film professor at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school, lazy script writing is part of the explanation for the blue tide on television and in the movies. . . . By contrast, she said, “Bad writers go for the emotional punch of crass language,” hence the fire-hose spray of obscenities [in] some modern films, almost regardless of whether or not the subject demands it. . . . Nicolosi, who noted that “nobody misses the bad language” when it’s omitted from a script, said any change in the industry has to come from among its ranks: “Writers need to have a conversation among themselves and in the industry where we popularize much more responsible methods in storytelling,” she said. . . . That change can’t come quickly enough for Melissa Henson, director of grass-roots education and advocacy for the Parents Television Council, a pro-decency group. While conceding there is a market for “adult-themed” films and language, Henson said it may be smaller than some in the industry want to admit. “The volume of R-rated stuff that we’re seeing probably far outpaces what the market would support,” she said. By contrast, she added, “the rate of G-rated stuff is hardly sufficient to meet market demands.” . . . Henson believes arguments about an “artistic need” for profanity are disingenuous. “You often hear people try to make the argument that art reflects life,” Henson said. “I don’t hold to that. More often than not, ‘art’ shapes the way we live our lives, and it skews our perceptions of the kind of life we're supposed to live." [DN, Apr. 13, 2014]

Even a member of the state district attorney’s office, Keva Landrum-Johnson, had sent a letter urging the federal Department of Justice to become involved. “More likely than not, the court will quash the indictments and the State will be left with no viable option other than to recharge some or all of the defendants on lesser offenses,” Landrum-Johnson wrote presciently on August 8, 2008, five days before Judge Bigelow did just that. “Admittedly, my office bears much of the responsibility for the position we are in now.” Landrum-Johnson,

8th Juror: Did you ever see a woman who had to wear glasses and didn't want to because she thinks they spoil her looks? 6th Juror: My wife. Listen, I'm telling ya, as soon as we walk outa the house... 8th Juror: Maybe the district attorney didn't know either. 6th Juror: Yeah, that's what I was just gonna say. 3rd Juror. Ok. She had marks on her nose. I'm givin' ya that. From glasses. Right? She never worn 'em out of the house so people think'd she was gorgeous.

8th Juror: Did you ever see a woman who had to wear glasses and didn't want to because she thinks they spoil her looks? 6th Juror: My wife. Listen, I'm telling ya, as soon as we walk outa the house... 8th Juror: Maybe the district attorney didn't know either. 6th Juror: Yeah, that's what I was just gonna say. 3rd Juror: Ok. She had marks on her nose. I'm givin' ya that. From glasses. Right? She never worn 'em out of the house so people think'd she was gorgeous.

8th Juror: Did you ever see a woman who had to wear glasses and didn't want to because she thinks they spoil her looks? 6th Juror: My wife. Listen, I'm telling ya, as soon as we walk outa the house... 8th Juror: Maybe the district attorney didn't know either. 6th Juror: Yeah, that's what I was just gonna say. 3rd Juror: Ok. She had marks on her nose. I'm givin' ya that. From glasses. Right? She never worn 'em out of the house so people'd think she was gorgeous.

Travis County District Attorney Dick Dorkin

successful career at the District Attorney’s office, but today none of these things gave her comfort or confidence.

Over the next twenty years, he earned a reputation as a renegade among renegades. It was almost as though he was determined to give new meaning to the term unorthodox. He broke every rule in the book, defied all the axioms ever preached about how to try a case, and in the process managed to infuriate at least a score of seasoned prosecutors and otherwise unflappable judges. But he also built a record unlike anything ever seen outside Hollywood or television land. In a business where district attorneys’ offices routinely boasted of conviction rates of anywhere from sixty-five to ninety-five percent, and where many defense lawyers heard the words Not guilty only at an arraignment, Jaywalker achieved an acquittal rate of just over ninety percent.

In early 2014, the Department of Justice and Education issued guidelines pressuring public school districts to adopt racial quotas when disciplining children. The basis for this guidance was studies showing that black children were over three times more likely to face serious punishment--suspension or expulsion--for misbehaving at school. The government concluded that school districts were engaging in massive illegal discrimination against black students. In fact, however, the government had no basis for its conclusion. The Supreme Court has explicitly stated that racial disparities in punishment do not by themselves prove discrimination, as they may just be consistent with the underlying rates of misbehavior by each group. There are no valid statistics (and the government hasn't cited any) from which one can infer that black students and white students would be expected to engage in serious misbehavior in school at the same rate. Unless there is some reason to expect kids to behave completely differently at school than outside of it, the school discipline figures are in line with what one would expect. African-American minors are arrested outside of school for violent crime at a rate approximately 3.5 times their share of the population. Moreover, as former Department of Education attorney Hans Bader notes, the government's own statistics show that white boys were over two times as likely to be suspended as their peers of Asian descent. By the government's logic, this means, absurdly, that school districts must be discriminating against white students and in favor of Asians. As of this writing, Minneapolis education authorities have announced their intention to end the black/white gap in suspensions and expulsions, a plan that struck many observers as announcing the imposition of quotas on school discipline.

Mike says the district attorney knows Vincent will be out in thirty, and his tough talk is theater for the voters of Rankin County. He says county officials are in a bind. Their conservative constituents have two demands: (1) Lock ’em away and throw away the key, and (2) don’t raise taxes. So officials go through the show of being arch-conservative, then, when faced with paying the prison bill, they release prisoners early. In fact, Mike says, this is why Vincent was out of prison early and able to kill Richard.

The victims I’ve worked with taught me that individuals want to believe they are entitled to justice. My community taught me that when the choice is clear-cut enough, so do entire counties. We have become profoundly discouraged about whether we have such choices. My own experience is that we do, if we are willing to pay the price. We need better data to make decisions based on performance, but getting that data is a matter of passing the right laws requiring crunchable statistics and mandatory public reports. The rest is on us. If Tip O’Neil was right, if all politics is local, then our local district attorneys are the place to start. Crime is local. What we do about it is as close as the nearest voting booth.

Under a Louisiana drug-forfeiture law, citizens who had their assets seized - and were uncharged - bore the burden of both proving their innocence and having to pay the highest bond in the nation (10 percent of the value of the property or $2500, whichever was greater) to sue for their return. Perversely, the 1989 law insured that forfeited assets were distributed in a manner that invited corruption. Sixty percent of the proceeds went to the law enforcement agency that seized the property, 20 percent to the district attorney, and 20 percent to a state judges' judicial-expense fund.

At the time of his death, the New York district attorney was investigating Noguchi for illegally experimenting on New York City orphans with syphilis vaccines without the consent of their legal guardians.

Criminal defense lawyers represent clients accused of a crime while prosecutors and district attorneys represent the interests of the state in prosecuting those accused of a crime.

No matter how hard I tried, whether it was to help Anthony, to threaten him, to sympathize with him, to ignore him, to throw him out of my house, it was impossible to move on. This man was going to ruin me, and now he was going to jeopardize HRC's chances of winning the presidency, which would leave our country in the hands of someone dangerously unfit for the office. On the plane after the event, Jen came over to update HRC. The letter Comey had sent to Congress was out. It confirmed what the reporters had heard. The Comey investigation was officially reopened. It turned out that the Southern District, which was prosecuting Anthony's case involving the teenager, had found emails of mine on his laptop and to this day I do not know where or how because I never knew they were there. They called the FBI's New York office, who then called the DC office, which meant the laptop had ended up with Comey. They didn't alert Anthony's attorneys or mine. I watched HRC's face as she processed it. The moment she made eye contact with me, I just broke down. I had held it together for months—through the night of the shocking photo, all the meetings with Children's Services, the paparazzi on the street, becoming a single parent overnight, the daily hate messages, and even, until just a few minutes ago, the news about Comey's announcement to Congress. But now that I knew the investigation somehow involved my own email, tears flowed out of me. HRC stood up from her seat, came over to hug me, and then walked with me to the bathroom so I could compose myself. On a plane full of colleagues, Secret Service agents, reporters, photographers—everyone with eyes simultaneously averted and questioning—she did that.

his alleged interest in the political destruction of a prominent Catholic District Attorney named Pelletier, from Boston's Suffolk County.

Parfenovich, the district attorney, sat trying to persuade him to sip some water from a glass that stood on the table: “It will refresh you, it will calm you down, you needn’t be afraid, you needn’t worry,” he kept adding with extreme politeness. And Mitya, as he remembered, suddenly became terribly interested in his big rings, one with an amethyst, and another with a bright yellow stone, transparent and of a most wonderful brilliance. And for a long time afterwards he recalled with surprise how these rings irresistibly drew his eye even through all those terrible hours of interrogation, so that for some reason he was unable to tear himself away and forget them as something quite unsuitable in his position.

As Cynthia Haden was leaving, Phil Halpin asked to speak with her up in his office for a minute. She followed him and Alan Yochelson up to the district attorney’s floor. Halpin thanked her for the verdict and asked her not to talk with the defense if they approached her. She said she wouldn’t and left, a bit bewildered about why they had apparently spoken only to her. When she got home, she called a few of the other jurors and they said they’d not been approached by the prosecutors.

Trial began on Friday, July 23, 1875... the jury which was finally selected consisted of eight Mormons, three Gentiles, and one Jack Mormon... When finally the case was closed and the case given to the jury, they could not agree upon a verdict, the eight Mormons all being for acquittal and the other four, all for conviction. The court was obliged to begin all over again and try the case before another jury. Even the most cursory examinations of the court records will show that between the first and second trials of Lee, something happened. When court opened again on September 14, 1876, the whole tone was changed... R.N. Baskin and other non-Mormons insisted that the leaders of the Mormon church had entered into an agreement with District Attorney Howard that Lee might be convicted and pay the death penalty, if the charges against all other suspected persons would be withdrawn. This was to be done by a jury composed only of Mormons, who would bring a verdict of "guilty", if names of other participants were left out of the discussion... This time the trial proceeded with dispatch. Men who had participated, and for almost twenty years had sealed their lips, now came forward to testify... On September 20, the case was given to the all-Mormon jury, who deliberated three and one-half hours and brought in a verdict of "guilty." [Lee was] convicted of murder in the first degree...

Could these groundbreaking and often unsung activists have imagined that only forty years later the 'official' gay rights agenda would be largely pro-police, pro-prisons, and pro-war - exactly the forces they worked so hard to resist? Just a few decades later, the most visible and well-funded arms of the 'LGBT movement' look much more like a corporate strategizing session than a grassroots social justice movement. There are countless examples of this dramatic shift in priorities. What emerged as a fight against racist, anti-poor, and anti-queer police violence now works hand in hand with local and federal law enforcement agencies - district attorneys are asked to speak at trans rallies, cops march in Gay Pride parades. The agendas of prosecutors - those who lock up our family, friends, and lovers - and many queer and trans organizations are becomingly increasingly similar, with sentence- and police-enhancing legislation at the top of the priority list. Hate crimes legislation is tacked on to multi-billion dollar 'defense' bills to support US military domination in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Despite the rhetoric of an 'LGBT community,' transgender and gender-non-conforming people are our 'lead' organizations - most recently in the 2007 gutting of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of gender identity protections. And as the rate of people (particularly poor queer and trans people of color) without steady jobs, housing, or healthcare continues to rise, and health and social services continue to be cut, those dubbed the leaders of the 'LGBT movement' insist that marriage rights are the way to redress the inequalities in our communities.

Owing, among other factors, to the exceedingly slow working of the lunacy commission, Bob’s trial was postponed until the fall of 1938. By then the city had a new district attorney: Thomas E. Dewey, the fearless young “gangbuster” whose relentless crusade against racketeers like Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano would propel him to the governor’s mansion in Albany and two runs for the White House as the Republican presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948.

The weekend of September 28, Manny Barraza came up to Los Angeles with an agreement by which Richard would assign all the rights of his story to his sister Ruth. The district attorney’s office repeatedly said it would not allow Ramirez to use funds from any sales of his story; such money, they said, would go to the victims. Nevertheless, Richard signed the agreement.

The Hernandezes’ strategy was to delay the proceeding as long as possible. In a multiple murder case, the best friend a defense lawyer has is time: witnesses die (as evidenced by Clara Hadsall), move away, forget, confuse details, and change their minds about testifying at all—not wanting to air in public and relive what amounted to the worst experience they’d ever had. “Any time a trial is delayed, you have the potential for the unavailability of witnesses. When we talk about justice delayed, it benefits only the defendant and his attorney,” District Attorney Gil Garcetti would later say.

Sasha sleeps as Richard and his companions goof around, play fighting. Sleeps as Richard’s cousin Lloyd bounds up and down the aisle flirting with a girl up front. Sleeps as Richard surreptitiously flicks a lighter and touches it to the hem of that gauzy white skirt. Wait. In a moment, Sasha will wake inside a ball of flame and begin to scream. In a moment, everything will be set in motion. Taken by ambulance to a San Francisco burn unit, Sasha will spend the next three and a half weeks undergoing multiple surgeries to treat second- and third-degree burns running from calf to thigh. Arrested at school the following day, Richard will be charged with two felonies, each with a hate-crime clause that will add time to his sentence if he is convicted. Citing the severity of the crime, the district attorney will charge him as an adult, stripping him of the protections normally given to juveniles. Before the week is out, he will be facing the possibility of life imprisonment. But none of that has happened yet. For now, both teenagers are just taking the bus home from school. Surely it’s not too late to stop things from going wrong. There must be some way to wake Sasha. Divert Richard. Get the driver to stop the bus. There must be something you can do.

In B-3 section, Haffenden may have commanded over one hundred investigators from the New York District Attorney’s Office, FBI agents, and cops who had joined the war effort, but Haffenden himself was never a member of law enforcement of any kind. He had been a good-looking man in his youth, with a poise and cunning in his eyes, but now he wasn’t sleeping, and he wasn’t placing much emphasis on keeping himself in shape and healthy. He was now completely devoted to his job. His dark hair was mostly gone. His waistline was expanding, he had a double chin, and his only exercise was a weekly golf game. His face still lit up, as he always found energy in leadership. He gave off an infectious enthusiasm, and exuded confidence well beyond his abilities. He was also creative, and equipped with an imagination that was so extravagant that at times it had to be reined in by his superiors. At other times, it manifested into strokes of pure genius.

By 'Perry Mason moment,' I mean that climactic instant during a trial when you have just done something fantastic and everyone in the courtroom knows it. Your brilliant question or some stunning admission you coerced from a witness has left the opposing lawyer reeling, his mouth agape, and jurors amazed and entertained. The case is won; the rest of the trial is a formality. Your friends and colleagues are itching to congratulate you as soon as a recess is called. Only a supreme effort of will on your part, coupled with the knowledge that the judge and jurors are watching, keeps you from high-fiving everyone in sight.