My estimation of the typical prosecutor or DA was quite low. Then I sat on the grand jury.

Before we ever started, he told us that if our hearts saw no crime, we had the discretion to not indict. This was strange, I was of the opinion they wanted to keep such things secret, after all. But he told us the story of a little old grandma, 90 years old, going to the airport and forgetting a Derringer in her purse.

They were so fucking lazy. I know what you see on TV, but our grand jury consisted of another on the DA team coming in, giving a 30 second summary of the crimes of the accused, showing us no evidence whatsoever, and then moving on to the next. Probably 25 or 30 of these minimum, before lunch rolled around. We were allowed to ask questions, for which there was always a smarmy answer.

"Oh, if you can't make it in, just call, a quorum's 9 so we probably won't even need to bring in an alternate".

They did discover a need to bring in an alternate, the morning only 9 of us showed up. I had veto power. Every drug case that they made no claim of violence or gross negligence... no bill. Then I heard the "This isn't justice! You're all temporarily dismissed, until we can get an alternate in here later this afternoon"

All because they had a hard-on for some college-aged kids selling weed. I think there was a sizable cash confiscation, but my understanding is that they got to keep the free money anyway. Even if not, I think the legal term is collateral estoppel, that is if they managed to "find" some new evidence they just introduced the case to a new grand jury when our term was up. I didn't really save anyone from anything, unless the prosecutors were truly as lazy as I believed them to be.

On another day where it was slow, he sat there bragging about (at least before covid) they'd have 4000 cases a year... and do 30 trials. "We like the trials, they're so fun, it breaks up the monotony". They didn't like trials enough to give them to the other 3970 defendants they charged. Nor were they even clever enough to recognize that the nature of plea deals coerces those defendants to waive their rights to a trial. None of people on his team ever scored 99th percentile on a standardized test while in elementary school, I'd bet money on it.

Though there was never an opportunity to ask, I often wondered if it clicked for him that his excuses for prosecuting crimes that shouldn't be crimes sounds an awful lot like the defense of those at Nuremberg.

It may be impossible to find justice in our world, but if it is to be found, it must be in the opposite direction of where these people live and work. Deep space, the edge of the visible universe, it's probably not feasible to go far enough away from them to find it.

Despite all of this, I have little doubt that if one of them were to quit, they could easily have written an article just like this one. Self-righteous, blind to the fact that they were if not the cause of these problems, then the biggest factor aggravating them. Remember, at the end of the day these assholes won't even do their job, they actively avoid trying to take each case to trial. If pleas aren't forthcoming and a two year stint in county waiting on a date won't cause the accused to budge, they're just as likely to drop it than push forward. They regularly pervert the bail process. They're complicit in turning it into a system of pre-conviction fines.

Fuck'em all.