This article was originally published in Vol. 4 No. 3 of our print edition.
The rule of law in the United States, and the application of the rule of law in the United States, has been warped and distorted beyond recognition, and beyond anything we have ever seen in our country’s history, by the George Soros-funded ‘progressive prosecutor’ movement. Put another way, what happens when elected district attorneys—members of their state’s executive branch—refuse to faithfully execute the law, or usurp the power of the legislature to themselves? They become rogue prosecutors.
Before discussing this issue and answering the question, it is important to step back and look at how the US criminal justice system differs from all other countries in the world. In the UK, they have the Crown Prosecution Service, which has various offices around the country, like other European countries. The Crown Prosecution Service is the sole prosecution agency for the whole country. That is not the way it is in the United States. We have 93 federal prosecutors called United States Attorneys, all of whom work for the United States Department of Justice under the command of the Attorney General of the United States. Those 93 US attorneys only handle about 10 per cent of the crimes that occur in the United States. Ninety per cent of the crimes that are prosecuted in the United States, such as murder, carjacking, burglary, and other such crimes, are handled by local elected prosecutors called district attorneys or DAs. In some states, these elected prosecutors are called the state’s attorney or the Commonwealth attorney. The United States is a big country. We have 3,143 counties in 50 states. Within those 3,143 counties are approximately 2,300 elected district attorneys.1
Until recently, no president of the United States has been prosecuted by a local prosecutor. But now that two elected district attorneys, both of whom are Democrats, have prosecuted former President Donald Trump for alleged crimes, it is not hard to imagine a local Republican district attorney filing criminal charges against soon-to-be former President Joe Biden. The only thing preventing a Republican district attorney from filing common law crimes against the Democratic president is integrity, history, fidelity to the law, and prudence.
Background, Origins, Playbook, and Beliefs
Prosecutors—all 2,300 elected district attorneys and the 93 US attorneys—are the gatekeepers to the criminal justice system. They and they alone, decide who is prosecuted and who is not. Their decisions on whether to prosecute or not prosecute are essentially unreviewable. Elections for district attorney across the country are low visibility and low dollar races. Even in the largest cities in our country, like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, a million dollars goes a long way in an election for district attorney.
George Soros, and the other people funding the ‘progressive prosecutor’ movement, which we call the ‘rogue prosecutor’ movement, realized that they could essentially buy a district attorney for a small amount of money. Other prominent people who have provided financial support to the rogue prosecutor movement include Facebook (now Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna; and Patty Quillin, the wife of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. To date, Soros has provided approximately $50 million in direct campaign spending, and by some estimates, up to $1 billion in indirect spending to support groups which endorse and promote the movement. Those behind the creation of this movement knew that 95 per cent of incumbents win reelection, and incumbents are unlikely to run in contested races. Most prosecutor races are uncontested.2
Crime in the United States
The United States has a crime problem. Even though we have had the lowest crime rates in our country since the last crime peak in 1992, we still have a crime problem. For example, in Hungary in 2021, there were 72 homicides. Compare that to the City of Philadelphia, where in 2021 alone there were 562 homicides. The United States has had over 20,000 homicides and manslaughters per year, and has had similar figures for years. In 2022, there were 21,156 homicide cases in the United States. In 2021, there were 561 car thefts in the entire country of Hungary. There were 11,341 in the City of Philadelphia alone in 2021. Keep in mind that a lot of car thefts go unreported in America because people realize that they will never get their car back, so instead of reporting their car to the police as stolen, they simply call their insurance company and get money to replace their car.3
The reason why crime rates went down from their peak in 1992 was because of a carrot and stick approach that took place across most states. States passed tougher laws to hold career criminals accountable for longer periods of time, which was the stick. As for the carrot, stakeholders across the criminal justice systems in the states created alternative courts such as domestic violence courts, drugs courts, family justice centres, veterans’ courts, and thousands of alternatives to incarceration to help people get the services they need and make the changes in their lives necessary to become productive members of society again.
That carrot and stick approach was working brilliantly. It does not mean there was no crime in the United States. There was. But as a result of that carrot and stick approach, we had the lowest crime rates in the country for the last twenty-five years, and the lowest incarceration rates we have had in decades. The rogue prosecutor movement, which started in 2015, did not need to come into existence. But it did, in large part because of their unorthodox beliefs.
Rogue Prosecutors’ Beliefs
Properly considered, there is not really one criminal justice ‘system’ in America. We have 50 states, 3,143 counties, over 18,000 police departments, 2,300 elected district attorneys, and 93 federal prosecutors (US attorneys). We really have criminal justice systems—plural—across the country. At the same time, of course, they all operate under the laws passed by their respective states, follow the rulings of the United States Supreme Court, and adhere to the Bill of Rights. Those rights include the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable governmental searches and seizures; the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination; the Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment; and the Fourteenth Amendment rights of due process and equal protection under the law, among others.
‘The best way to defeat a Soros-funded or inspired rogue prosecutor is not to elect one in the first place’
The rogue prosecutor movement is animated by two beliefs. First, even though we fought a Civil War to end slavery, passed and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment (abolishing slavery in the states), abolished Jim Crow laws, passed the Civil Rights Acts, brought Supreme Court cases like Brown v. Board of Education, and more, the progressive prosecutor movement believes that the entire United States, all corporations, American capitalism, and the criminal justice systems in all 50 states and the federal government are systemically racist. Second, that the only way to ‘fix’ that system is to ‘reverse engineer and dismantle the criminal justice infrastructure’, to quote Rachael Barkow, who was a member of the US Sentencing Commission and an advocate for the rogue prosecutor movement.
The rogue prosecutor movement is antithetical to the structure of the criminal justice system, as I explain below. The United States has an adversarial criminal justice system where you pit a hard-charging, ethical prosecutor against a hard-charging, ethical, and creative criminal defense attorney, and they try their case before a neutral judge in front of a jury of the defendant’s peers and let the chips fall where they may.
So how does the rogue prosecutor movement accomplish the task of ‘reverse engineering’ and ‘dismantling’ the criminal justice infrastructure? How can it accomplish the task of ‘opening up the locks of prisons’, to quote another advocate of the movement? If you want to ‘change the system from within’, one of their stated goals, how do you do that? You replace independent, fair-minded ethical prosecutors who faithfully enforce the criminal laws of their state with a pro-criminal, anti-victim zealot. That person is the gatekeeper to the criminal justice system, and that person can make sure that very few if any individuals go to prison. And he or she can also make sure that people in prison who were convicted by their office get out of prison.
The Playbook
Some readers may have heard of an activist and author named Angela Davis, who wrote Are Prisons Obsolete?4 There is an active, Marxist-inspired, anti-capitalist movement in the United States called the ‘prison abolitionist movement’. It is a wacky, fringe movement, but one that is now becoming a little more mainstream, and has reified itself in the form of the rogue prosecutor movement. They believe that all prisons should be abolished and all police departments should be defunded. However, they do not offer any real alternatives to prisons or public safety.
Once a rogue prosecutor is elected, they issue orders to their subordinate prosecutors. Those orders include prohibiting their prosecutors from prosecuting most, if not all, misdemeanors in their jurisdiction. We have all seen videos on YouTube from places like San Francisco, where people are shoplifting from stores, in broad daylight, with impunity. Those criminals know that they can get away with those crimes because the district attorney in their city has proudly announced that he will not prosecute shoplifting. When a prosecutor publicly announces which crimes he will not prosecute, criminals will commit more of those crimes, safe in the knowledge that they will not be prosecuted. That is common sense.
Many of these rogue prosecutors list on their office websites crimes that they will not prosecute. In other words, they are listing crimes that you can commit in that jurisdiction. For example, in Boston, the district attorney listed fifteen crimes you can commit, including trespassing, shoplifting, larceny under $250, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, receiving stolen property, minor driving offenses, breaking and entering, malicious destruction of property, threats, drug possession, possession of drugs with intent to distribute, and resisting arrest, among others.5
These prosecutors do not like the police. And the police, naturally, do not like these rogue prosecutors. They order their prosecutors to water down many felonies to misdemeanors. They do not let their prosecutors ask for cash bail in most cases, thus allowing a person charged with a crime, including a violent crime, to be on the streets pending a resolution of their case. Cash bail in the United States typically requires individuals to post 10 per cent of the dollar value of the bail, in order to guarantee that they will show up for their next court appearance. If defendants fail to show up the next court appearance, they lose that 10 per cent. The rogue prosecutor movement opposes cash bail, which they call a ‘poverty penalty’. The result of not asking for cash bail is that most criminals walk out the back of the courtroom door, and the door becomes a revolving door.
They do not allow their prosecutors to ask for sentencing enhancements, which in some states are required depending on the circumstances. Sentencing enhancements are authorized by many states and allow a prosecutor to allege that a criminal who committed a crime should if convicted, have his sentence enhanced (i.e. lengthened) because of having used a gun, or targeted a minority, or had prior felony convictions, or some other circumstance that makes the commission of and conviction for the crime all the more serious. Even though these rogue prosecutors claim to take gun crimes seriously, they do not allow their prosecutors to add ‘gun enhancements’ in cases where a person has used a gun in the commission of a felony. Nor do they allow their prosecutors to charge violent juveniles, such as sixteen- or seventeen-year-old gang members, as adults in adult court, even when they commit murder, rape, or child abuse, even though state law allows for those juveniles to be tried as adults for those crimes. These are just a few of the many pro-criminal, anti-victim policies enacted by rogue prosecutors across the United States, as we outlined in our book, Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities.6
Prosecutorial Nullification
These radicals claim that their pro-criminal policies are merely a proper exercise of what is called ‘prosecutorial discretion’. It is a legal term used to describe the judgment prosecutors use each day on each case and with every witness. They assess the strength of a case, the strength or weakness of each piece of evidence, and the credibility of every witness, including police and law enforcement officers involved in every case. They decide, after weighing all of these facts, and using their experience and common sense, whether they have a strong, average, or weak case. They decide whom to charge and whom not to charge. But they do so based on the legality of the evidence gathered their office policies, the law, and the facts in each case. That is not what rogue prosecutors are doing. They are not exercising ‘prosecutorial discretion’. Rather, they are engaged in ‘prosecutorial nullification’ by refusing to prosecute entire categories of crimes, by refusing to enforce the law, by ignoring victims’ rights laws at the state level, and other such outrageous activities.
This abuse is a violation of the separation of powers in our country. In the United States, political power is divided equally between the three co-equal branches of the government, at both the federal and state levels. Those three co-equal branches are the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch. Prosecutors sit in the executive branch. Their job is to faithfully execute the law with proper discretion.
The Results
There are about 2,300 total elected district attorneys in the 3,143 counties across the United States. Of those 2,300 approximately 74 are bought and paid for by the likes of George Soros and others, and those rogue prosecutors represent over 70 million people or more than one in five Americans. Cities that have elected rogue prosecutors have seen massive increases in crime. And in cities with the toxic trio of an elected rogue prosecutor, city officials who have defunded the police, and others who have demoralized the police, crime has risen most.
See the chart below of murders in Chicago. The blue columns represent murders in Chicago by year before Kim Foxx, the first Soros rogue prosecutor, was elected. Murders went up when she was elected and have reached historic highs. And despite what some on the left would have you believe, the COVID-19 global pandemic was not the cause of the rise in crime rates in these cities. Crime rates started to rise in those cities well before 2020 when the pandemic took hold around the world.
Voters in the city of Philadelphia elected Larry Krasner as district attorney in 2018. On his first day in office, Krasner fired 31 career violent crime and homicide prosecutors and started replacing them, over time, with former public defenders, criminal defense attorneys, or those whose sympathies were associated with criminals, not the victims of crime. As we outlined in our book, Krasner, like all rogue prosecutors, enacted a series of pro-criminal, anti-victim policies, and forced his prosecutors to follow them, much to the chagrin of local police and the local federal prosecutor, named William McSwain. As a result, crime exploded in Philadelphia. As the chart below shows, homicides started to go up immediately.
Sadly, non-fatal shootings went up from a pre-Krasner three-year average of 1,047 per year to 1,588 per year. Aggravated assaults while armed with a handgun went up from a pre-Krasner five-year average of 2,209 per year to an average of 3,116 per year. Retail thefts went from a pre-Krasner five-year average of 7,412 per year to an average of 9,084 per year. In addition, auto thefts went from a pre-Krasner five-year average of 5,691 per year to an average of 8,665 per year.7 Each city that elected a Soros rogue prosecutor has similar crime statistics. This is, by definition, a failed social experiment, and one which has produced millions of crime victims across our country.
A Deadly, Failing Social Experiment
This movement has wrapped itself in the warm fuzzy language of the American civil rights movement. They pretend that their policies will end the terrible legacy of racism that existed in our country. The sad irony of this movement, however, is that the vast majority of victims in this movement, especially the victims of homicide, are black and brown men. So a movement that was ostensibly created to combat so-called ‘systemic racism’ is leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of minorities.
That is why this social experiment is starting to fail. People in the inner cities see this for what it really is. A failure. That is why voters in San Francisco recalled Chesa Boudin. That is why the voters in Baltimore refused to re-elect Marilyn Mosby. New York City’s prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, the man who prosecuted former President Donald Trump, is a Soros-inspired rogue prosecutor, as is Atlanta’s Fani Willis, who is also prosecuting Trump. That is why Florida Governor Ron DeSantis expelled Monique Worrell from office for not doing her job as a prosecutor. Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon has survived two recall elections but may lose his general election this coming November.8
But this movement is not failing fast enough. There have been too many victims of too many crimes in too many cities across our country as a result of this radical, anti-democratic, warped version of justice. The best way to defeat a Soros-funded or inspired rogue prosecutor is not to elect one in the first place. Public safety in the United States depends, in large part, on who occupies the office of the local district attorney.
NOTES
1 U.S. Department of Justice, Officers of the United States Attorneys, About the U.S. Attorney’s Offices www.justice.gov/usao, accessed Aug. 5, 2024; Carissa Byrne Hessick, and Michael Morse, ‘Picking Prosecutors, 105 Iowa L. Rev. 1537, 1547’, (2020); United States Census Bureau, County Population Totals and Components of Change: 2020–2023, www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-counties-total.html, last accessed 5 August 2024. See also Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts data: for the year ending in March 2022, criminal cases filed totaled 56,348, including transfers. Administrative Office of the United States Courts, ‘Table D. Cases, U.S. District Courts–Criminal Cases Commenced, Terminated, and Pending (Including Transfers), During the 12-Month Periods Ending March 31, 2021 and 2022’, https://view.officeapps.live. com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uscourts.gov%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fdata_tables%2Ffjcs_dcases_0331.2022.xlsx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK, accessed 5 August 2022. In contrast, over 12.7 million state court criminal cases were initiated in 2020 in 40 states for which data is available: CSP Stat Overview: Caseload Detail – Total Criminal, Court Statistics Project, www.courtstatistics.org/court-statistics/interactive-caseload-data-displays/csp-stat-nav-cards-first-row/csp-stat-overview, accessed 4 August 2024.
2 See: George Soros, ‘Why I Support Reform Prosecutors’, The Wall Street Journal (31 July 2022), www.wsj.com/articles/why-i-support-reform-prosecutors-law-enforces-jail-prison-crime-rate-justice-police-funding-11659277441. See also Theodore Schleifer, ‘Mark Zuckerberg is Creating a New Criminal Justice Reform Group in Overhaul of His Operation’, VOX (27 January 2021), www.vox.com/recode/2021/1/27/22251211/mark-zuckerberg-priscilla-chan-czi-criminal-justice-immigration-overhaul; Joe Schoffstall quoting Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer about how Zuckerberg’s cash quietly influenced the race in ‘Mark Zuckerberg Cash Discreetly Leaked into Far-Left Prosecutor Races’, Fox News (2 August 2021). See also ‘Criminal Justice Reform Strategy’, Open Philanthropy, www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/criminal-justice-reform/criminal-justice-reform-strategy, accessed 2 April 2022. See also Paige St. John and Abbie Vansickle 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 in ‘Here’s Why George Soros, Liberal Groups Are Spending Big to Help Decide Who’s Your Next D.A.’, Los Angeles Times (23 May 2018), www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-prosecutor-campaign-20180523-story.html.
3 John Gramlich, ‘What the Data Says about Crime in the United States’, Pew Research Center, (24 April 2024), www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/, accessed 5 August 2024. See also Barry Latzer, The Myth of Overpunishment: A Defense of the American Justice System and a Proposal to Reduce Incarceration While Protecting the Public (2022), 73–84. For homicide and car thefts data from Philadelphia in 2021, see Philadelphia Police Department, ‘Crime Map and Stats’, www.phillypolice.com/crimestats/, accessed 5 August 2024. For car thefts in Hungary in 2021, see the Hungary Today article, which cites National Police Headquarters (ORFK) statistics, ‘Top List of Vehicle Thefts in Hungary in 2021’, Hungary Today, https://hungarytoday.hu/car-vehicle-thefts-hungary-hungarian-police/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20the%20Hungarian%20police,Suzuki%20is%20third%20with%20 56, accessed 5 August 2024. For homicides in Hungary, see Hungarian Central Statistical Office, ‘Justice, Registered Crimes (2000–2023)’, www.ksh.hu/stadat_files/iga/en/iga0003.html, accessed 5 August 2024.
4 Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003).
5 Zack Smith, and Charles D. Stimson, Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities (Bombardier Books, 2023), 155–160. See also ‘Appendix C, SCDAO Declination and Diversion Policy, C-1 to C-9, March 25, 2019’, The Rachael Rollins Policy Memo, chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://files.suffolkdistrictattorney.com/The-Rachael-Rollins-Policy-Memo.pdf, accessed 5 August 2024.
6 Smith and Stimson, Rogue Prosecutors.
7 See generally Philadelphia Police Department, ‘Crime Map and Stats’. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner was elected and sworn into office in 2018. To access the crime statistics for the five years prior to his election, scroll down the page to the specific year of inquiry. For example, crime reports for the year 2017 can be accessed here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B23Pg6Sgxll1b3FOTGphM3c3OTQ?resourcekey=0-JB38T9JSdZ-qtzJEGMyn7A. See also Smith and Stimson, Rogue Prosecutors, 115–120.
8 Jeremy B. White, ‘San Francisco District Attorney Ousted in Recall Election’, Politico (8 June 2022) www.politico.com/news/2022/06/08/chesa-boudin-san-francisco-district-attorney-recall-00038002; Brian Witte, ‘Baltimore Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby Defeated in Primary’, AP News (22 July 2022) https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-covid-health-general-marilyn-mosby-1742b1a284798e7 6a89f974cd8c5e497; Charles ‘Cully’ Stimson and Zack Smith, ‘Meet Alvin Bragg, Rogue Prosecutor Whose Policies Are Wreaking Havoc in Manhattan’, The Heritage Foundation (31 January 2022), www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/meet-alvin-bragg-rogue-prosecutor-whose-policies-are-wreaking-havoc; Jeremy B. White, ‘Progressive Prosecutors Contend with Backlash Politics’, Politico (16 August 2023), www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2023/08/16/progressive-prosecutors-contend-with-backlash-politics-00111510; See the statement of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida on 9 August 2023: ‘Governor Ron DeSantis Suspends State Attorney Monique Worrell for Neglect of Duty and Incompetence’, FLgov.com, www.flgov.com/2023/08/09/governor-ron-desantis-suspends-state-attorney-monique-worrell-for-neglect-of-duty-and-incompetence/; ‘Second Attempt to Recall Los Angeles Prosecutor George Gascon Fails to Make Ballot’, NBC News (15 August 2022) www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/second-attempt-recall-los-angeles-prosecutor-george-gascon-fails-make-rcna43243; Clara Harter, ‘Election 2024: Gascon Leads Crowded DA Race; Hochman in Second in Semi-Final Results’, Los Angeles Daily News (6 March 2024), www.dailynews.com/2024/03/05/george-gascon-leads-crowded-da-race-with-nathan-hochman-in-second-in-early-returns/.
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