Danger of Poor Prosecutor

Words by the then U. S. Attorney and later U. S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson - Address to the Second Annual Conference of U. S. Attorneys, Great Hall, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.1940

He will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.  With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.  In such case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.  It is in this realm – in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies.  It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to, or in the way of, the prosecutor himself.

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