San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin isn’t alone in his views on criminal justice reform, and like other progressive district attorneys—including George Gascón in Los Angeles, Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore, Rachael Rollins in Boston, Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and Steve Descano in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Progressive prosecutors sabotage the rule of law, raise crime rates, and ignore victims.
Rogue prosecutors usurp the role of state legislatures, thereby violating the separation of powers between the executive branch and legislative branch. When a prosecutor decides to no longer prosecute certain crimes, he or she is essentially usurping the authority that belongs to the People’s Representatives in either a state assembly or the congress. No prosecutor has the authority to do such things.
Rogue prosecutors abuse the role of the district attorney by refusing to prosecute broad categories of crimes, thereby failing to enforce the law faithfully.
Violent crime goes up and victims’ rights are ignored in rogue prosecutors’ cities.
The American prosecutor occupies a unique role among lawyers. The prosecutor has a higher duty than other attorneys. His duty is to seek justice, not simply to obtain convictions. As the American Bar Association notes, “The prosecutor should seek to protect the innocent and convict the guilty, consider the interests of victims and witnesses, and respect the constitutional and legal rights of all persons, including suspects and defendants.”
Prosecutors play a vital and indispensable role in the fair and just administration of criminal law. As members of the executive branch at the local, state, or federal level, they, like all other members of the executive branch, take an oath to support and defend the Constitution and faithfully execute the law as written. They do not make laws. That is the duty of the legislative branch.
On one level, prosecutors carry out the intent of the people by enforcing the laws their representatives passed and the governor or President signed. On another level, they work with the other two branches of government by sharing their views with legislators about bills up for consideration and with judges about the proper application of those laws in particular cases. In doing so, they occupy a unique, distinct role as key members of the executive branch with immense power and even greater responsibility.
The so-called progressive prosecutor movement in reality is a “rogue prosecutor” movement. They are attempting to upend the traditional and customary role of the prosecutor in American society with short-term and potentially long-term disastrous consequences on a number of levels.
As the Trump Presidency was ending, crime rates were the lowest they have been in decades. Incarceration rates are also the lowest they have been in decades. This did not happen by accident, nor did it happen because of the policies of rogue prosecutors. Instead, it happened because independent traditional prosecutors, who follow the law and believe in protecting victims’ rights and the right to be safe from crime and violence, created alternatives to incarceration, specialty courts, community outreach programs, and more. The rogue prosecutor movement depends in part on the public’s historical ignorance of those and other facts.
There is nothing progressive about the rogue prosecutor movement. It is dangerous and fundamentally flawed for four reasons:
- It usurps the constitutional role of the legislative branch;
- It abuses and misunderstands the role of the county prosecutor;
- Violent crime increases in cities where rogue prosecutors have been elected; and
- Victims are forgotten and public safety overall suffers.
The woke progressives have radical goals, and employ various tactics in their rogue prosecutor movement.
The rogue prosecutor movement has been vocal about its goals. The movement consists of donors, candidates for district attorney, elected rogue prosecutors, and academics and activists. Those recruited by the movement to run for office tout their “progressive” bona fides and suggest that we need to “reimagine” a better criminal justice system.
It is a serious movement in large part because leftist billionaire George Soros has dumped and continues to dump tens of millions of dollars into specific DA races and into dark-money PACs that identify, recruit, and fund criminal defense attorneys to run against independent law-and-order prosecutors. Academics, mostly in the form of law review articles, support and defend the movement.
The rogue prosecutor movement has a variety of goals, but its principal three aims are to:
- Replace independent progressive and traditional prosecutors, who follow the law and believe in protecting victims’ rights and ensuring public safety, with criminal defense attorneys and activists who are beholden to the movement;
- Usurp the constitutional role of the legislative branch by refusing to prosecute entire categories of crimes; and
- End cash bail for all crimes.
If these goals sound radical, that is because they are. Movement leaders and activists are not shy about their goals and, in fact, have written and spoken about them for some time.
According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, the word “progressive” means “making use of or interested in new ideas, findings, or opportunities.”
There is nothing “progressive” about the rogue prosecutor movement, and the only thing that is “new” about this dangerous movement is its members’ approach, which has caused crime to explode in the cities where rogue prosecutors rein, harming the very people about whom they profess to care the most.
Links & Sources
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/criminal_justice/standards/ProsecutionFunctionFourthEdition/
See David Alan Sklansky, The Progressive Prosecutor’s Handbook, 50 U.C. Davis L. Rev. Online 25 (2017); see also David Alan Sklansky, Commentary, The Changing Political Landscape for Elected Prosecutors, 14 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 647 (2017).
See, e.g., Scott Bland, George Soros’ Quiet Overhaul of the U.S. Justice System, Politico (Aug. 30, 2016, 5:25 AM), https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/george-soros-criminal-justice-reform-227519
See also Paige St. John and Abbie Vansickle, Here’s Why George Soros, Liberal Groups Are Spending Big to Help Decide Who’s Your Next D.A., L.A. Times (May 23, 2018, 7:00 AM), https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-prosecutorcampaign-20180523-story.html
(detailing the tens of millions of dollars Soros and other like-minded individuals have poured into various DA races and PACs in order to back rogue prosecutor candidates).
See David Weigel, Down the Ballot, Liberal Reformers Take over the Criminal Justice System, Wash. Post (Sept. 5, 2018),
(Note that the first victory in the campaign to transform the criminal justice system via rogue prosecutors came in early 2016, when George Soros plunked down $300,000 into a PAC created to elect Kim Foxx as the state’s attorney of Cook County, Ill.).
See Progressive, Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/progressive
(last visited Oct. 19, 2020).
See Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, Prosecutorial Malpractice: Progressive Prosecutors, Public Safety, and Felo ny Outcomes (2020),
http://www.policedefense.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Prosecutorial-Malpractice.pdf
(showing that in six cities where rogue prosecutors were elected, guilty verdicts decreased substantially, and those same offices dropped or lost cases by substantial percentages compared to when the offices were headed by independent, traditional law-and-order prosecutors).
See also Paul G. Cassell, Explaining the Recent Homicide Spikes in U.S. Cities: The “Minneapolis Effect” and the Decline in Proactive Policing, Federal Sentencing Reporter (forthcoming 2020), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3690473