Prosecutors Gone Rogue Place U.S. in Grave Danger

In 2015, two far left "anti-death penalty" lawyers convinced billionaire George Soros to contribute one million dollars to a "Safety and Justice" political action committee dedicated to electing like-minded candidates district attorney in Louisiana and Mississippi.

After the leftist candidates won the races, Soros agreed to finance campaigns for district attorney throughout the nation.

And by 2022, 14 of the nation’s 30 cities with the highest murder rates had Soros prosecutors.

The destruction these radical district attorneys have wrought on their towns and cities is vividly described in, "Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities," written by two former federal prosecutors now with the Heritage Foundation, Zack Smith and Charles D. Stimpson.

The intellectuals who laid the ideological foundations of the movement to eliminate police, prisons, and jails, were 1960s radicals including Herbert Marcuse, Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis.

Angela Davis, for example, in her book, "Are Prisons Obsolete?," described a prison as "a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited."

She argued "incarceration relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism."

Smith and Stimson contend that the movement, inspired by Davis and her confreres, has been promoting two big lies: that we have a mass incarceration problem in our country and that our criminal justice system is systematically racist.

To advance these false assumptions, the Abolitionist Movement focused on district attorney races because "prosecutors, not police, have the final say as to whether charges are filed against people who are arrested, and because prosecutors occupy that unique position, by eliminating independent Progressive and traditional prosecutors and replacing them with attorneys who are beholding to a movement that sees defendants as victims, you 'reverse engineer' and 'dismantle' the criminal justice system as it currently exists."

Thanks to George Soros, who pumped more than $40 million into D.A. races, "at least 72 million Americans suffer under the rule of rogue prosecutors. . . . In fact, rogue prosecutors reign in almost half of America’s 50 most populous cities and they have overseen almost 40% of all homicides."

By refusing to prosecute numerous crimes that are on the books, those district attorneys are usurping the role of state legislatures under the guise of "prosecutorial discretion."

This criminal justice approach, however, has been backfiring. The lax policies have actually been harming the very people they are intended to help — minorities.

In the eight cities examined in the Smith-Stimson book, "there have been at least an additional 3,090 homicides, 3,580 rapes, 7,500 robberies, 14,800 motor vehicle thefts, countless thousands of non-fatal shooting victims, and hundreds of thousands of other crimes (and victims) in those cities between 2015 and 2021. And of those 3,090 extra murders, over 75% of the victims were minorities."

While crime has remained flat or decreased in cities with law and order prosecutors, crime has increased in every city that has elected a rogue prosecutor.

One of the district attorneys Smith and Stimson profile presides in my hometown: Manhattna District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

With $1 million from Soros, Bragg easily won the Democratic Primary and general election in November 2021.

Right after being sworn in, Bragg issued a "Day One" memo announcing the following criminal offenses would no longer be prosecuted in New York County: possessing marijuana, refusing to pay the fare for public transportation, trespassing, failing to pay fines for unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, resisting arrest, obstructing government administration, engaging in prostitution, and committing most other misdemeanor offenses.

"The only misdemeanor I ever prosecuted," Bragg boasted, "were two people who were blocking access to a Planned Parenthood facility."

Alvin Bragg happily supports the elimination of cash bail for most crimes including, robbery, carjacking, witness tampering, domestic violence, arson, kidnapping, larceny, and the use of a child in a sexual performance.

Reacting to the "Day One" memo, New York City Police Commissioner, Keechant Sewell, told her police force that she was "very concerned about the implications to your safety as police officers, the safety of the public and justice for victims."

Sewell was right. Bragg’s policies have contributed to an increase of attacks on NYPD officers. In one case, the New York Post reported in June 2022, Bragg "cut a break for two women who allegedly attacked NYPD cops in a wild assault caught on video, letting one of them off the hook and downgrading the charges for the other."

Crimes in Manhattan have gone up in every category because District Attorney Bragg’s policies have promoted "a culture of lawlessness and undermines the rule of law." 

Smith and Stimson have performed a great service in exposing the damage Soros prosecutors are doing to our criminal justice system.

"Rogue Prosecutors" should be read by every citizen and elected official committed to the rule of law.

(Related articles may be found here, and here.)

George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." Read George J. Marlin's Reports — More Here.