4 of America’s Most Abusive Prosecutors

There’s no shortage of bad prosecutors in America. At the top of the law enforcement pyramid, there are federal prosecutors  seeking to lock up pot growers for life (Montana) and those deporting of hundreds of immigrants every month (Texas), destroying lives as if they were disposing of traffic fines. But lower down the pyramid, where the country’s  17,000-plus state and local police departments dump cases on their desks, is where many criminal defense lawyers say the worst prosecutors are.

“I think the biggest injustices are at the state level,” said Miles Gerety, a public defender in Connecticut who recently retired after three decades. “The U.S. attorneys don’t try cases unless they are complete winners… If the feds don’t think they have a good case, they dump it on the states.”

A perfect example would be Florida State Attorney  Angela Corey, who not only oversaw the failed prosecution of Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, but also oversaw the prosecution of Marissa Alexander, an African-American woman who fired a warning shot at her abusive husband and was sentenced to 20 years under Florida’s sentencing guidelines. In both cases, Corey approved the charges to be filed—making it harder to convict a predatory Zimmerman and easier to convict a domestic abuse victim.

There’s no shortage of  examples like this through the country. The deeper you look, the more you can turn up local and state examples of overzealous prosecutors bringing a battlefield mentality to their job, or botching prosecutions, or covering up for police brutality, or using their job as a stepping-stone for political office. What follows are a four examples that stand out, but they just scratch the surface.

1. Florida State Attorney Angela Corey

The Marissa Alexander conviction prompted celebrity lawyer and legal commentator Mark Geragos to  tell CNN that Angela Corey was “a menace” who needed to be disbarred and removed from office. Rev. Jesse Jackson visited the 32-year-old mother after the sentence and  told the local papers, correctly, “It’s not beyond her influence,” to have sought a different charge and jail term.” And that was before the Trayvon Martin verdict, where even the New York Times  explained that Corey could have filed different charges against Zimmerman with lower legal hurdles to clear to obtain a conviction.

2. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott

Top Texas lawman Greg Abbott just  announced he was running for governor. What stands out the most is not his recent conversion in the media to a centrist before seeking the higher office, or his long record  picking legal fights to overturn federal voting rights laws, but one initative before the cameras were rolling. A decade ago, Abbott sent state troopers after elderly women of color who were registering voters. In the most outrageous  example, the state troopers walked past known crack houses to spy in and then arrest one elderly woman—waiting until she was taking a bath. It was all part of an “voter fraud” effort, which in Texas, means stopping non-whites from voting.

3. Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes

Brooklyn, New York’s top prosecutor, has been in office for 23 years, the  Village Voice recently noted in a long profile that detailed why a prosecutor who was once seen as “innovative” had to go. In recent years, Hynes has presided over an office filled with  bad prosecutions, including scores of cases from one detective who fabricated evidence, sending innocent people to prison. In other instances, his deputies let innocent people  languish in jail after witnesses recanted or others were charged with the same crime.