MANCHESTER, Conn.
While former President Donald Trump has long been mainly a grifter, his indictment by a Manhattan grand jury is not justified by the cant coming from Democrats in Connecticut and around the country: the cant that “no one is above the law.”
To the contrary, criminal prosecution is almost always largely a matter of prosecutorial discretion.
Alvin Bragg, the current Manhattan district attorney, ran for office implying that his office would prosecute Trump for something. And now Bragg has persuaded a grand jury to indict the former president for 34 alleged felonies. But Bragg has been routinely reducing felony charges to misdemeanors for offenders who are not named Trump.
Federal and other state prosecutors have so far declined to press against Trump charges like those now being pressed in Manhattan because those other prosecutors considered the evidence too weak.
Bill Clinton broke criminal law while in office but received prosecutorial discretion, being considered above the law.
Connecticut is full of prosecutorial discretion. The state long has put illegal immigrants above the law, facilitating their breaking of federal immigration law and obstructing its enforcement by federal agents. Lately Connecticut also has been putting marijuana users and sellers above the law, pretending that federal drug law -- which, rightly or wrongly, continues to criminalize the drug -- is nullified by the state law that actually has put state government itself into the marijuana retail licensing business.
Indeed, U.S. Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland has formally stated that President Biden’s Justice Department has decided that enforcing federal marijuana law in states that don’t want it enforced would not be a good use of the department’s resources -- still more prosecutorial discretion that puts people above the law. So much for the U.S. Constitution’s command that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Connecticut’s law against murder does not seem to be enforced in New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford as well as it is in Woodbridge, Easton and Avon. About 80 percent of the murders in the last several years in New Haven remain unsolved. There is plenty of discretion as to where the state allocates its police resources.
Sometimes prosecutorial discretion may serve a more cosmic form of justice. Sometimes prosecutorial discretion is political opportunism. But someone everywhere is always above the law.
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Just as its men’s basketball team was winning the national college championship and putting the University of Connecticut in the spotlight across the country, dozens of students rioted on the campus at Storrs, pulling down lampposts, breaking windows and starting fires, discrediting the university at what should have been its most glorious moment in years. Fourteen people, most of them students, were arrested, and 16 others were injured badly enough by the mayhem to be hospitalized.
The university’s admissions department has a lot to answer for. How do such thugs get into something that calls itself higher education?
Of course, the thugs have even more to answer for than the admissions department does. Having been arrested, some may actually be prosecuted, though most criminal charges in Connecticut these days are so heavily discounted in court that the law has lost deterrence. Most of the young rioters probably will be penalized in court with nothing more than probation.
The university promises its own vigorous internal discipline of the rioters, including possible expulsion. UConn should regularly update the public about that process -- to reassure the public and deter any other thugs on campus. The basketball team, its coaching staff, its fans, and everyone else in Connecticut deserved far better, and the state needs to be shown that, at least at UConn, nobody is above the law.
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A reader offers what might strike most people as a good idea: that each criminal court in the state should issue a weekly report of cases concluded and their outcomes, and that newspapers should publish the reports. But it won’t happen because the General Assembly, with a far-left political majority obliged by Gov. Ned Lamont, lately has been ordering the erasure of criminal records.
Most legislators and the governor think the public knows too much about criminal justice.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com).
