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What’s the Limit of Leftist Lawlessness?
An interesting thing happened last week. During a trollish straight-pride parade in Boston, some Antifa folks got violent and assaulted some people and police. The prosecution decided to drop the charges, but the judge refused the dismissal and insisted on a prosecution. From the left-leaning USA Today:
A decision to drop charges against left-wing protesters arrested at Saturday’s Straight Pride Parade has turned into a courtroom fight, pitting a newly elected district attorney who ran on reform-minded platform against a Boston judge.
In an unusual move, Municipal Court Judge Richard Sinnott this week refused to follow Suffolk County DA Rachael Rollins’ request to dismiss charges against many of the 36 counter protesters arrested for disorderly conduct during the parade and rally.
Rollins responded Wednesday by filing an emergency petition to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, asking a justice from the state’s highest court order Sinnott to accept the dismissals. She accused him of overstepping his authority by acting as the prosecutor himself.
“The actions of Judge Richard Sinnott are unprecedented and outrageous,” Rollins said. “His insistence on arraigning individuals when my office has used its discretion to decline a case is an unconstitutional abuse of his power and serves neither the interests of justice nor public safety. The power to pursue prosecution falls exclusively on the executive branch, not the judiciary.”
We have seen Democrat prosecutors refuse to enforce laws that protect individual rights back in the KKK days a century ago. A few years back it allowed rioters room to expend their energy in Baltimore. Then it was the mayor of Charlottesville provoking conflict between Antifa and Tiki-torchers. Then a prosecutor in Chicago (Cook County) refused to prosecute the obvious fraud of Jussie Smollett. Now, we have a prosecutor in Boston refusing to prosecute members of a violent mob after arrest.
The Democrat-run government is effectively tolerating anti-First Amendment thugs attacking peaceful citizens. How far will the tolerance of lawlessness go? Will we see someone allowed to get a prosecutorial pass on the murder of some MAGA hat wearing citizen?
This is beyond the above-the-law actions of the Clinton’s and Comey’s, this is the breakdown of law-and-order in your backyard. Now, more than ever, is time for rule-of-law Americans to speak out and demand that government at all levels do its primary task and ensure the rights of the citizenry.
Published in Law
No limits. Obama weaponized the IRS, the Intel community, and the DoJ, as in Justice. And he only got approval of his “scandal free” administration from those watchdogs on behalf of the people, the Press. We already have a two-tiered justice system in which people like Hillary Clinton can get away with acts of treason (sharing national secrets with the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians and destroying subpeonaed evidence) and true public servants like General Flynn face jail time.
The now Suffolk County DA Rachael Rollins ran her election campaign on a platform of not prosecuting crime. She campaigned that she would not prosecute whole categories of crime (theft or property destruction up to several hundred dollars is the one I remember most vividly). So it’s an interesting question – if the voters elect a prosecutor who explicitly says she is not going to prosecute crime, do the citizens have to accept that decision and all its ramifications? I think she would be on more solid ground if she went to the Board of Supervisors (or whatever the elected legislative body is called) and asked for legislation to remove from the criminal code theft, assault, and other activity she thinks should not be prosecuted.
https://rollins4da.com/policy/charges-to-be-declined/
There’s a very old and trite saying'” What goes around comes around”.
The Left is now openly encouraging violence against those whom they disagree with and at the prosecutorial level refusing to prosecute crimes committed by their friends and allies.
The Left has no honor and no shame. To the Left the ends justifies the means – always – in their minds. Please don’t call them “liberal”- the term liberal is a derivation of the term ‘liberty” which the Left abhors and does not deserve to be associated with.
DonG needs to be commended for this posting. This is a very serious issue. Too many Americans and many here at Ricochet – refuse to believe that our fellow citizens on the Left would stoop this low, but that is where we are at- in big way. The Left makes no pretense of being civil yet many moderates – the so-called Never Trumpers principally among them, get a case of the vapors every time someone on the Right forthrightly calls out the ugly and not even close to being civil behavior of the Left.
We as a nation need to take this issue very seriously, because what the Left is doing here is fomenting violence and trying to escalate it into a hot and violent Civil War. The only way to stop this uncivil violence from escalating into something very terrible is to strictly return to honoring all our Constitutional Rights and the Rule of Law across the Board. No more pansy equivocating about the crimes of the many, many Leftist Progressive miscreants.
Amen!
I’d be curious what Ricochet’s lawyers have to say about this.
My presumption is that an attorney general’s unmitigated discretion not to prosecute ends when that AG chooses to file charges. Or can a prosecutor unilaterally drop charges at any point thereafter in most states?
Their limit is the Left wins, all else lose. This is the only limiting principle.
Prosecutorial discretion is nearly absolute. Courts may dismiss upon motion from the defendant if the court concludes the prosecutor has failed to prove the offense beyond a reasonable doubt, but other than that courts cannot prevent a prosecutor from pursuing or refusing to pursue a case.
Fortunately, we happen to have federal laws for just this situation, used against white power structures in the Civil Rights era.
As I suspected, Rachel Rollins is another DA that was backed by George Soros-affiliated PACs.
https://needtoknow.news/2018/12/boston-newly-elected-da-funded-soros-vows-stop-prosecuting-resist-arrest-15-crimes/
Another DA backed by the Soros project – Cook County DA Kim Foxx, benefactor of Juicy Smo-yay.
As Thomas Sowell has taught us, the Left operates with no limiting principles. So it stands to reason that it would also operate with no limiting laws either.
One would hope that the decision by the prosecutor not to prosecute would at least be explained. Was it because the evidence was lacking? Was it because the crimes were too minor to deal with? Was it because the prosecutor’s office lacks the resources to handle these cases without having to drop other more important cases?
If the answer to all these is “no,” and therefore the decision is nothing more than ideological, perhaps there could be a higher authority to compel prosecution. I suspect that there isn’t, though.
From the Heritage Foundation on the “Take Care Clause”:
“The Take Care Clause (also known as the Faithful Execution Clause) is best read as a duty that qualifies the President’s executive power. By virtue of his executive power, the President may execute the lawful and control the lawful execution of others. Under the Take Care Clause, however, the President must exercise his law-execution power to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
Somewhere along the way, the Attorney General was given powers by the Courts to over-rule the President’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and was given the prerogative to decline to prosecute or the idea of prosecutorial discretion. Additionally this idea has filtered down to our local jurisdictions. The Leftwing and the Progressive dominated Courts in their multi-generational attack on our Republic have consistently sought to give government officials unfettered and unaccountable oversight of the law where they can defy the Constitution’s ideas of limited government and it’s checks and balances on the abuse of official power allowing them to run amok in the pursuit of Leftwing hegemony. This is just another example in a very long list of seeking to nullify the Constitution.
If Constitutional Rights of our citizens are being grossly violated, which in the case of Straight Pride Parade attacks by Antifa they clearly were and where you have a situation where the local law enforcement officials are in an apparent conspiracy seeking to deny those citizens their rights, it is incumbent that the AG step in and faithfully execute the law.
AntifA has organized criminal attacks all around the country, and has a multi-state organizational and funding apparatus, which means long ago the Justice Department should have determined that the Antifa movement was a national criminal conspiracy. As such the AG should have stepped in long ago to protect the rights of our Citizens and stopped these attacks but again has declined to do so. This lack of faithfully executing the laws is a clear stain on AG Barr and can only be seen by Anitifa as a green light to foment more and more violence.
To me, every “gay pride” parade is a troll. However, note how they are almost never counter-protested. Finally, we get a “straight pride” parade, and violence ensues. No surprise there, since the left thrives on violence.
Aside: Why all this “pride” in one’s sexuality? Who cares what garage a person parks his car in . . .
This is not an issue of lawlessness. The DA is correct that prosecutorial discretion resides in the hands of the prosecutor.
This is not a failure of the system. It is a feature. The solution is at the ballot box, and this is precisely the type of bad government that might give a Republican a chance in Massachusetts.
Some of the comments above correctly indicated that there might be alternative grounds to prosecute under federal law. Also, the state attorney general might have independent authority to prosecute (or might not — it would depend on state law).