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The following has been the ideal for scores of years.
“[A prosecutor] is the representative . . . of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” Berger v. United States, 295 US 78 – 1935.
Despite this ideal, the hundreds of convictions that have been attained through prosecutor’s win-at-all-costs mentality is a national shame.
The only remedy for this is to allow only qualified immunity from suit for prosecutors instead of absolute immunity, which is the current situation.

Dorothy Rabinowitz is great, absolutely terrific.

Tawana Brawley claimed that she was held in a cabin to be a sex slave to some local police officers. She claimed that they wrote the N word on her body, smeared her with dog feces, put her in a garbage bag and dropped her off at her house. That ridiculous story made sense to governor Mario Cuomo and the New York Times. If you are on the hook for major felonies, wouldn’t you kill the witness instead of taking her home? That case went on for months, even years. But the police knew within a day or two that a neighbor lady saw Tawana crawl into the bag.

I forget the details but police knew early on that the story of the accuser in the Duke case was suspect. There were weeks of shameful (and idiotic) behavior of Duke faculty. According to Ms. Rabinowitz the accuser in the DSK case practically confessed her lies to her boyfriend the day after her claims. So, why did it take so long to dispose of these nonsense charges?

It is chilling that Ms. Rabinowitz’s is correct when she says that a conviction, based on public hysteria, was probable.

Mr. Brafman is a terrific lawyer. Nothing good could result from any attempt of DSK to defend himself in the media, and no such attempt was made. And DMK did not bite on Alan Dershwitz’s vile advice to settle. Settlement is an admission of guilt in the court of public opinion, and a big payday for the extorting lawyer.

William Nuesslein wrote:

[…]

>DMK did not bite on Alan Dershwitz’s vile advice to settle.

This is a little unfair to Dershowitz. He was assuming, based on media accounts, that DSK, known to be “a bit of a lad,” was guilty and that the accuser’s story would hold up. I doubt very much if Dershowitz was advising Mr. Brafman to give up looking for the truth, if there was a chance the truth would help his client.

Michael Jackson paid $20 million to induce an accuser to go away. One would have hoped the experience would have made him more cautious when a family of grifters dangled another minor in front of him, but apparently not.

> Settlement is an admission of guilt in the court of public opinion, and a big payday for the extorting lawyer.

I agree.

I agree with Mr. Cunningham that professor Dershowitz worked from an assumption of guilt. But he could have pointed out the Tawana Brawley case and other cases of false accusations. If you remember public opinion in the United States was roused up by a conversation by Mark Furman, which conversation was eight and a half years before the OJ trial and related to work on a screen play. Dershowitz was part of that. I am surprised that Americans did not convict Sir Laurence Olivier for the murder of Polonius.

It is impossible to be too hard on Professor Dershowitz; he is pure evil.

The $20 million in the Michael Jackson case paid off an almost certain false claim. The boy’s father was jealous that his estranged wife was able to have his son be with the popular Michael Jackson. The family that dangled another minor in front of Michael Jackson were extortionists using the ill will of the settlement.