“Rogue Prosecutor Panic”

The title of this post is the title of this new paper just posted to SSRN and authored by Michael L. Smith. Here is its abstract:

Discussions of criminal law, enforcement, and reform are frequently messy and misleading.  Anecdotes distract from systematic abuse, and perceptions of crime frequently win out over existing trends.  This essay identifies Zack Smith and Charles Stimson’s book, Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers are Destroying America’s Communities, as an example of this shoddy discourse.  Smith and Stimson’s claim that “Radical Soros Lawyers” are being mobilized to destructive ends crumbles under minimal scrutiny, and I identify several core defects throughout their narrative, including a failure to demonstrate a truly unified scheme of ideology and funding amongst the prosecutors they identify, baseless assumptions that increases in crime are attributable to prosecutorial reform, and their ignorance and downplaying of the context in which prosecutorial reform exists.  I close with some thoughts on how to improve discussions of prosecutorial reform to avoid the alarmism, flawed assumptions, and general ignorance that perpetuates existing discourse.