The Los Angeles prosecutors are very nasty. Especially in Van Nuys where I know a woman & her experience. She was afraid of going to court because she was taken to jail a couple of times in a row. A simple case of petty theft ended up costing over $20k in legal fees, court costs, & other opportunists scamming money from her. Courts don't try to work with the defendants. They have strict rules and breaking a rule means being punished, usually through loss of freedom and/or some heavy fine.

It's difficult to speak out about this because people don't want to pay heed to, nor believe, "criminals". Our society is intolerant & also complicit with these injustices. It's quite often to have measures to have "zero tolerance" and "lock up criminals and throw away the key". There is collateral damage with such measures.

Such measures is tantamount to creating an underclass who can be easily taken advantage of and who have little voice and no sympathy.

Note: She also had some emotional issues. Being put in jail for minor incursions does not help. Instead, it rips apart her life & the lives of those who try to help her.

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@crito - Now you know a bit more about where my "persecution complex" comes from. People who are in a judgmental frame of mind show little restraint when meting out punishment. It's f*cked up & unhealthy. At risk of sounding like I have a victim mentality, there's more.

That's why I'm a proponent of a tolerant society. People make mistakes. People have unhealthy viewpoints. Our society feels a strong desire to blame & punish others. However, judgement only makes things worse for everybody by perpetuating the cycle.

It's far better to encourage health & rehabilitation. But then, there are entrenched interests who want to, or at least have no compunction to, keep the majority of the population down. Thus they encourage a perpetual state of fear.

Related: I don't understand how the "few bad apples" defense always seems to be used to argue for "so ignore it" rather than "and by the way, when we find a bad apple, it goes straight in the garbage disposal where it belongs". Like, all these prosecutors are going apeshit because a judge dared to say they should possibly lose their licenses -- what about the idea that they should serve time, time comparable to what they may have capriciously caused innocents to serve? "Law and order" is all well and good, but I'd like to see it go both ways once in a while.

I don't think they should lose their licenses, they should be tried for contempt and the mandatory minimum applied.

Prosecutors might be well served in these instances by the judge refusing a plea bargain as is their prerogative.

Mike Nifong is a good example of someone who abused his office. Wikipedia calls him a "rouge" prosecutor. Maybe he wasn't so rouge...

Off-topic pedantic point. Ro_gu_e is an adjective that means without guidance or lacking oversight. Ro_ug_e is a type of cosmetic, namely one for making the cheeks redder. While the image of a red-faced prosecutor screaming at his clerks is amusing, I don't think it's what you had in mind.

Sorry to distract from your otherwise valid comment.

Completely relevant point, I would say: I assumed ‘rouge’ meant ‘red’ in that context, a.k.a. presumed socialo-communist, a.k.a. a prosecutor trying to redress economic and political injustices, going after the rich and powerful and ignoring petty crimes, like several prosecutors have been accused of doing in France and Italy. That made the original common odd.

> mandatory minimum applied

I’m not familiar with mandatory minimum for contempt. I would believe it fails to match the point, that is to allow the judge to operate his or her courtroom reasonably.

I suppose there is some tradeoff involved with crafting new rules, but all the new rules that I have seen suggested seem sensible and reasonable.

Add on top of the few bad apples spoiling the barrel the fact that certain positions and jobs create quite strong arrogant bastard self-selection pressures and it's an extra recipe for disaster. It's the same as the NSA -- people who have doubts about the system or feel like being lenient will self-select out, just like those who believe in actual privacy and civil liberties will self-select out of the NSA, creating a remnant that's filled with group-thinking evil apples.

Frankly, I think we'd be better off selecting people are random from the population at large to be in such powerful positions.

I appreciate the intent to use random citizens to hold power, but prosecutor might be the position where years of professional training matters. Remember what Churchill said about five minutes with the average voters? Well, there is one bigger scandal in any democracy (it is actually mentioned in the article) and that’s how much someone accused of anything, specially if he happens to be unattractive, socially isolated, poor and male, is presumed guilty. This is far worst for ‘random people’, and allowing non-experts to choose who to prosecute without consequence would lead to spectacular injustices.

That’s why it is the jury who is made of inexperienced citizens selected at random: prosecutors now have the burden to convince them all, including those who empathise with the accused. They are judged over their career by how their prejudice leads them to bad cases, and prevents them from winning cases.

If prosecutors saw acquittals as failure on their part, and need to re-consider their world-view, that would work. I believe the article and the judge see the problem as them seeing such (rare) events as abuse of the system against them, personification of the innocent defendent public, and that’s the source of the issue.

I think that one solution is to make being a prosecutor a political dead end. In other words, convince the public to never, under any circumstances, vote for anybody who has ever been a prosecutor (except perhaps if the position in question is prosecutor, though excluding this exception would be creating de facto term limits which might be a good idea anyway...).

That way somebody only becomes a prosecutor if being a prosecutor is what they actually want to do with their career in public service. It would not be a stepping stone for a further career in politics.

If term limits (de facto or de jure) existed for prosecutors, that would put the brakes on prosecutors optimizing for conviction rate.

What always amuses me about the "bad apple" defense is that in many situations I would imagine that if you objectively looked at the size of an organization vs the number of people involved in scandals over the years, it's not just a couple of bad apples but quite the opposite - say a statistically significant higher rate of xxx crime or behavior vs the general population.

I would imagine this happens by itself really: once something like corruption/bullying/sadism becomes established enough in any small or large institution, it tends to drive people with a conscience away (instead of attracting them to where they are most desperately needed) - where that doesn't happen actively, that is, as a sort of self-defense against likely snitches. So over time, left unchecked, it just compounds.

Wait, it's not "a few bad apples are no big deal, dispose of them when something happens to get press"?

I always thought it was just about how people judge apples. That's like if the laws of physics and biology had a real example of broken window theory.