Psyche, Science, and Society

In Praise of a Prosecutor

By Scott Horton

What makes a bad prosecutor? It’s simple: Does the prosecutor’s longing for the public limelight, his aspirations for public office, come to overwhelm his dedication to justice, to simply doing the right thing? It’s said that a famous chief prosecutor from Dallas, Henry Wade, summed up the thinking that goes into a really bad prosecutor like this: “any prosecutor could convict a guilty man, but… it takes a real pro to convict an innocent man.”

Each year Bob Bennett, a former federal prosecutor who now heads his own litigation firm in Houston, Texas, publishes an invaluable list of the “ten worst prosecutors in the United States.” In the era of Bush, the competition to make the list has grown fierce. Last year, Bennett’s list was a sort of Bush-justice rogues gallery, starting with the world’s worst prosecutor, the disgraced (but still not indicted) former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. It’s worth a read.

The Bush Administration has been a breeding grounds for this kind of abuse, stoking and rewarding it. But it’s worth remembering that there are honorable, dedicated, professional prosecutors at work, even in the Bush team—men like David Iglesias and David McKay, and women like Carol Lam. (They were all fired, of course.) And today’s Wall Street Journal brings an account of another prosecutor worthy of the name: Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins. And if there’s one trait that Watkins brings to the job, it’s a dedication to justice and a determination to right the injustices of the long line of legendarily bad prosecutors who went before him–including Henry Wade.

Craig Watkins may be the only prosecutor in America who is making his name getting people out of prison. As district attorney of Dallas County, Mr. Watkins is using DNA evidence to investigate more than 400 guilty verdicts notched up by his predecessors. His office’s Conviction Integrity Unit, launched last year for this purpose, has so far cleared six men wrongly convicted of rape, murder or robbery. In the past two decades, more than 200 convicts nationwide have been freed thanks in part to DNA testing. The tests involve taking biological material such as blood from the person convicted and comparing it to a sample left at the crime scene…

Mr. Watkins’s approach marks a change for Dallas, criticized for decades as a convict-at-all-costs county. It gained national notoriety in 1988 with the release of The Thin Blue Line, a documentary recounting the case of a man railroaded by prosecutors and wrongly convicted of murdering a police officer. Dallas County has had a string of district attorneys with tough-on-crime reputations stretching back to the legendary Henry Wade. Mr. Wade held the position from 1951 through 1986. He prosecuted Jack Ruby for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald and was the named defendant in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that decriminalized abortion. Mr. Wade was famous for never losing a case he personally prosecuted, and for getting juries to impose the death penalty nearly every time he asked. His staff of assistants was almost as successful, and all told, won convictions in more than 150,000 cases.

Of course, there are a number of prosecutors who are riled up about Watkins. They think he’s giving the criminal justice system a bad name by showing that it misfired. These are precisely the sort of prosecutors whose indifference to justice is causing our system to rot from within.

Watkins is doing God’s work and furnishing an example to the new U.S. attorneys who will shortly be appointed by Barack Obama. They have a Herculean task–restoring public confidence in a Justice Department which has been transformed into a cesspool of unethical conduct and corruption–before them. And they will have to start with a stern look at the ineptitude and misconduct of their predecessors–including cases like the prosecution of Alabama’s Don Siegelman, Mississippi’s Paul Minor and Wes Teel, and Pennsylvania’s Cyril Wecht—that are now a blot on the nation’s reputation for justice.

A positive aspect of the Bush legacy

The international community now has a potent new motivating tool to dissuade world leaders from engaging in tyranny and aggression — tell them they’ll be like George Bush if they do it:

By Glenn Greenwald

Nicolas Sarkozy saved the President of Georgia from being hanged “by the balls” — a threat made last summer by Vladimir Putin, according to an account that emerged yesterday from the Élysée Palace.

The Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr Putin declared.

Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?” — he asked.

“Why not?” Mr Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”

Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?”

Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: “Ah — you have scored a point there.”

Diplomats and human rights activists could use that tactic for all sorts of noble purposes:  ”You shouldn’t detain people without trials; you don’t want to end up like Bush.”  ”You shouldn’t torture; you don’t want to end up like Bush. ”  ”You shouldn’t use secret prisons or invade countries that haven’t attacked anyone or spy on your own citizens in secret; you don’t want to end up like Bush,” etc.  This would be the positive converse of the recent trend whereby thugs like Robert Mugabe and even Putin justify their internal repression by pointing to the use of such measures by the Bush administration.

It has been remarkable to watch the political elite in the U.S. spend the last several months expressing righteous rage over Russia’s invasion of Georgia, given that this is the same group of people which remain unrepentant supporters of the U.S. attack on Iraq and the ongoing occupation of that country.  They thus vehemently condemn the Russian invasion (a) of a bordering country (b) which had attacked first and that (c) led to an occupation of two weeks which (d) entailed no bombing of any kind on the capital city and (e) resulted in deaths measured by the hundreds, even while the righteous condemners in the U.S. themselves cheered on and continue to justify:

an American invasion (a) of a country half way around the world (b) which had not attacked and could not attack first and that (c) led to a brutal occupation of six years and counting and (d) entailed massive bombing of the capital city and mass destruction of others and (e) resulted in the deaths measured by the hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of millions more.

Our self-loving foreign policy community actually still thinks it’s in the position to be the world’s leader in defining “justice” when, for much of the world, it’s now the living, breathing definition of the opposite.