The Progressive Prosecutor Project

A newly minted district attorney for a major American city vows to establish an immigration unit. At first blush, that would seem entirely normal for a prosecutor’s office. Immigration laws require enforcement, and prosecutors are in the law-enforcement business. But no—the new San Francisco DA actually has in mind an immigration defense unit. He wants to assign a staff of prosecutors to protect undocumented aliens—those who are either illegal and thus deportable to begin with, or for whom a criminal conviction could result in loss of lawful status and thus eventual deportation. The unit’s enforcement target would be not the law violators but the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who enforce federal laws, along with any local police and corrections officials who have the temerity to assist ICE in that endeavor. The prosecutors’ mission, in the words of their new boss, would be to “stand up to Trump on immigration”—the president having made signature issues of border security and the stepped-up deportation of aliens who flout the laws. That kind of immigration unit is not something you’d expect to find in a district attorney’s office. But of course, neither would you expect, upon this new DA’s election, a victory party marked by ear-splitting chants of “F*ck POA!” The POA is the Police Officers Association. May I introduce to you, then, a new and uniquely destructive actor on the 21st-century scene: the progressive prosecutor. For such law “enforcers,” the obstruction of immigration-law enforcement barely scratches the surface. The agenda here is to obstruct prosecution itself. It is, to quote Chesa Boudin, the newly elected progressive prosecutor described above, “a movement…rejecting the notion that, to be free, we must cage others.” ...The key to understanding the Machiavellian brilliance of the Progressive Prosecutor Project is this: As a matter of constitutional law, no legislature or court has the power to order a prosecutor to charge any crime against any person. In our system, prosecution is exclusively an executive call. Practically speaking, short of voting a rogue district attorney out of office, there is no remedy for abusive discretionary omissions—decisions not to prosecute. To be sure, if a prosecutor performs some affirmative illegal act while enforcing the law, there are legal remedies available—motions to suppress evidence, lawsuits against government, potentially even prosecution. But omissions are a different story. It is nigh impossible to force prosecutors to take enforcement action. Thus, a willful district attorney has enormous power to install non-prosecution as the default policy.
Realizing this, the left’s social-justice warriors have grasped that the control of prosecutorial power may be the most effective route to rapid societal transformation...MORE