Prosecutorial misconduct rightly did in Alec Baldwin's murder case. Where's the scrapping of other bad cases just like it?
A basic tenet of rule of law in a functioning republic is that prosecutors must play fair.
They can't skew justice their way, the way the Soviets did. They can't hold show trials. They can't put their thumbs on the scale of justice and rig it all one way before it even gets to a jury. If they do, they aren't the legitimate face of the law, they're just activists.
So the recent decision from a New Mexico justice to throw out the murder case with prejudice against actor Alec Baldwin, who accidentally shot dead the cinematographer on the set of a movie he was making was the right one, even if it leaves the victim without justice.
According to Deadline:
In a dramatic turn of events, Alec Baldwin‘s involuntary manslaughter trial for the fatal 2021 shooting of Rust cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was dismissed Friday over “critical evidence” that a New Mexico judge ruled had been concealed.
“The state has repeatedly made representations to defense and to the court that they were compliant with all their discovery obligations,” New Mexico Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer said in her ruling from the bench just now. “Despite their repeated representations, they have continued to fail to disclose critical evidence to the defendant.”
Yes, it should have been thrown out, even if Baldwin is an absolute a-----, a bully, a jackass, an egomaniac, and deserves to be a pariah for the remainder of his selfish, miserable life.
The injustice wasn't in the dismissal of the case, but in the prosecutors' concealment of evidence they knew they were mandated by law to disclose, which may have lessened Baldwin's culpability in the eyes of a jury. The prosecutors knew the rules but ignored them, wanting a conviction without playing by the rules, even though they probably could have gotten some kind of conviction just by letting the truth out. They wanted to make the jury's decision for them.
Which stands in stark contrast to a lot of other high profile cases going on where prosecutors have been getting away with often similar or this exact same prosecutorial misconduct.
Start with the case of sleazy Jack Smith, the questionably appointed Special Counsel in two of the cases directed against President Trump, the one where Trump is charged with stealing or mishandling classified documents. According to Politico:
In their filing, prosecutors acknowledged the government had previously — and incorrectly — told U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that the boxes remained “in their original, intact form as seized,” other than a decision to replace classified documents with placeholder sheets.
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” prosecutors wrote, adding in a footnote: “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.”
Smith claimed it didn't matter, but by the wildest of coincidences, the version he presented of the documents showed more carelessness and disorder than actually was the case, which disadvantaged Trump.
Advantage: Jack Smith, who figured a jury would be easier to manipulate to his point of view if it could be shown pictures of classified documents slopped all over the place and flung around. He even took pictures to show it.
He nakedly tried to put his thumb on the scale and this case still hasn't been dismissed.
Why hasn't it? That alone should dismiss it.
There's also the case of Kamala Harris, former prosecutor and attorney general of California, who kept people in jail beyond their sentences in order to exploit their labor to fight wildfires, and witheld "Brady" evidence (same as in the Baldwin case) that would have exculpated a man in a death penalty case. Why wasn't her case thrown out and why wasn't she disbarred right then and there? The New York Post has a long list of her prosecutorial abuses in her seedy past.
And there's more yet, in myriad cases against the Jan. 6 protestors, all of which yielded late-stage disclosures of exculpatory evidence prosecutors knew about but decided not to tell the defendants about, again, more Brady motion violations, same as Harris and the Baldwin prosecutors engaged in.
According to Epoch Times News:
A defendant in the Proud Boys trial over Jan. 6, 2021, charges moved on March 9 to dismiss the case, after some footage from the day of the breach was shown for the first time.
Dominic Pezzola is one of the Proud Boys members on trial for obstruction of an official proceeding and other charges. The newly disclosed footage, shown on Fox News this week, “is plainly exculpatory,” Pezzola’s lawyers said in the new motion.
“It establishes that the Senate chamber was never violently breached, and—in fact—was treated respectfully by January 6 protestors,” the motion reads.
... and ...
Prosecutors must not withhold evidence that can be exculpatory. The rule was crystallized in Brady v. Maryland, a 1963 Supreme Court decision.
“Suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused who has requested it violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution,” the decision states.
Zachary Rehl, another Proud Boys defendant, requested all information regarding Congress going into recess on Jan. 6, 2021, in late 2021.
“While Brady obligations do not extend to the entirety of the government, they do include investigative agencies or agencies closely related who knew or should have known that information would be material to a prosecution arising from their direct involvement. Here the U.S. Capitol Police are directly related and fully aware of the events of January 6, 2021,” lawyers for the defendants said.
They cited previous court decisions, including one that found that a prosecutor “has a duty to learn of any favorable evidence known to the others acting on the government’s behalf in the case, including the police.”
Joe Biden even had a judicial nominee who had no idea what a Brady motion was. He got confirmed, 51-48, with one abstention this past January. Why wasn't he disbarred instead?
All of these people deserve the exact same fate as the New Mexico judge gave to the lawless prosecutors in the Baldwin case -- to see their cases thrown out with prejudice and further punishment for misconduct on the cards. That is the standard and prosecutors should positively fear that law and thus, obey it with religious fervor.
People have a right to expect lawful, impartial justice, particularly on the prosecutorial side, which has enormous power. Because of that power, it has a special obligation to act lawfully given that it's in an accusatory position demanding others be punished. When prosecutors fail to follow the law, they are the lawless ones and should be punished with more than just the dismissal of the case with prejudice. They ought to be in jail, as an example to others.
The New Mexico judge understood this. Why so many Democrats let this slide, mostly when their target is named Trump or Trump-friendly, tells us all we need to know about the justice system such as it is right now.
Image: Screen shot from NBC News video, via YouTube