Confessions of an Ex-Prosecutor – Reason.com

Tod Kelly

Tod is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. He is also serves as Executive Producer and host of both the 7 Deadly Sins Show at Portland's historic Mission Theatre and 7DS: Pants On Fire! at the White Eagle Hotel & Saloon. He is  a regular inactive for Marie Claire International and the Daily Beast, and is currently writing a book on the sudden rise of exorcisms in the United States. Follow him on Twitter.

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15 Responses

  1. Oscar Gordon says:

    Ken is a much needed counter to the endless political & media cheerleading of DAs.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      Word.

      Would we had more of him.Report

    • Yup, we were all getting tired of the hero worship of Marcla Clark and Chris Darden.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Mike Schilling says:

        The irony with that case is that, had it been just some random black man, Clark & Darden would have been worshipped as heroes.Report

        • Sorry, not following. Do you mean that because a random black man wouldn’t have had a legal Dream Team, they would have gotten the conviction easily?Report

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to Mike Schilling says:

            Pretty much. It would have just been a pair of noble, hard working prosecutors taking a homicidal black man off the streets. No one would have looked hard at the evidence, no one would have asked tough questions of the prosecution’s case, etc.

            Hell, it probably would have never made it to trial, just settled with a plea deal after they indicted with every charge they could spin the thinnest justification for.Report

        • Francis in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          If the defendant had been some random black man, it would have been just another day at the office for any of the hundreds of felony prosecutors in the Los Angeles County DA’s office.

          And the Clark / Darden were outworked, outargued, and out-litigated by the defense team. They went the publicity route and got their asses kicked. Ask any public defender and they would tell you that it absolutely was a winnable case for the prosecution. The DA’s office has a small, virtually unknown and highly-respected prosecution team they use on death penalty cases. (Quickly, what’s the name of the prosecutor who just won the Grim Sleeper case?) For reasons that remain unclear to me, the DA selected Clark / Darden as the prosecutors, when they were simply not ready to handle a case that complicated.Report

      • @mike-schilling

        Do you contest Oscar’s (and Ken White’s) larger point that our popular culture has sent and continues to send a lot of pro-prosecutor messages?Report

        • When I think of prosecutors who are considered heroes, the examples that stand out are people like Giuliani, who went after the Mafia, Curiel (the judge Trump went after), who went after the Mexican drug cartels, and Eliot Spitzer, who went after malefactors of great wealth. Typical ones, not so much.Report

          • What about the TV shows that White alludes to in his main article (Law & Order comes to mind)?Report

          • LeeEsq in reply to Mike Schilling says:

            Your not thinking like an average person. Most people and nearly the entire media tend to see prosecutors as heroes putting away the baddies. Its why you rarely see defense counsel depicted well in most police procedurals if you see them at all. Defense counsel for profit are depicted more despicably than the ones that work for the public defender, who might get shown as good moral people.Report

  2. Road Scholar says:

    Anyone remember that one TV show, maybe 15 years ago or so, based on the Innocence Project? I seem to remember some plots were based around various types of prosecutorial misconduct. If you don’t you can be forgiven since it only lasted one season, if that.Report