Does that mean Harris is off your list, too?
The bottom line is that I'm voting blue no matter who Biden picks, or even if they replace Biden with a week-old dog turd.
But I generally didn't like her presentation and policy. On the prosecutor side of things, her office violated its obligations to turn over to the defense in hundreds of cases evidence that a state lab tech had been stealing seized drugs from the lab and possibly falsifying drug test results to cover the fact. There's no way a DA does
not get told of such a major problem, and there's no way that DA does not understand that that evidence would have a huge impact on every single defendant's case involving drugs the tech touched, even had access to.
That's the kind of thing that I simply cannot forgive, and I don't think that's simply because I do criminal defense (appeals/post-conviction stuff only). We had a much larger double scandal here in MA like that. Thousands and
thousands of people served time after convictions that relied on falsified drug test results. Two separate lab techs were stealing and falsifying for
years.
As with Harris, the relevant DA's offices hid the evidence. But they couldn't suppress media stories about the lab tech's arrests. The Committee for Public Counsel Services and an army of defense attorneys dug. This was litigated up and down the courts. At every step of the way, the various DA's offices continued to hide the extent of the problem, fought tooth and nail to protect tainted convictions, and only folded after an immense number of hours were put into making sure the right thing happened. Blew up any number of cases.
That kind of attitude - that they're doing the "right thing" in general so they can cheat along the way to get the results they want - is why I don't like most prosecutors. I've seen it in too many cases. Sometimes it's not turning over evidence, sometimes it's using jailhouse snitches who have a practice of getting deals in their own cases by claiming that their cellmate confessed, making arguments to the jury that are not allowed (ie, telling the jury to put itself in the victim's place and imagine what
she felt, an appeal to sympathy). The Suffolk DA's office has a regular practice in murder cases of "finding" one or two banker's boxes with thousands of pages of documents in them just a week or two before trial. Does the judge want to call them on their obvious lie?
So now the defense attorney has to decide how much time to take away from preparing for the case based on what he previously knew vs. how much time to spend assimilating all this new information. And sometimes it's stuff like completely unexplained data. Cell tower data, for example, just raw data with no explanation of what it's supposed to mean. (And I'm thinking of one case a firm we worked with had to deal with). These cases can be huge. So if, as with the case I'm thinking of, you already had to process tens of thousands of pages of information to prepare for trial.... several thousand more is a last-minute nightmare. It blows everything up.
No. Nor does the judge want to extend the case. End result: defendant goes to trial with an deliberately and unfairly hobbled attorney, and the prosecutor reaps the advantage of its deliberate late-disclosure.
Every single American who ever had a nice thing to say about "rights" or our constitution should be insulted and infuriated by such behavior. How
dare the government cheat like that when it is trying to put someone into jail. It's all the more infuriating because it's generally so unnecessary. Most criminals are stupid. They leave their ID at the scene or the talk to the police and get tripped up telling a story. They convict themselves in most cases. But the prosecutor just has to cheat.
Annnnd that was longer than intended.
