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Carissa Byrne Hessick Profile picture
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13 Nov, 7 tweets, 3 min read
Fascinating @rachelweinerwp article about the court battles of a judge in Alexandria who is being sued by both the local prosecutor and the local public defender.
washingtonpost.com/local/legal-is…
The judge and the local prosecutor @parisa4justice are clashing, in part, because VA gives prosecutors less control over charging decisions than a lot of other states. For many crimes, police make charging decisions, and prosecutors have to move to dismiss.
A bill was introduced in the VA legislature that would have changed this arrangement, giving VA prosecutors more power to dismiss charges without having a judge weigh in.

It looks like that legislation stalled. Do folks in VA know more? lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp60…
Whoops --- actually the story says that the Governor just signed legislation. So I guess there must have been more than one bill on the topic. Image
In any event, the judge, Daniel S. Fiore, is taking fire for some of his actions. His approval ratings with local lawyers is lower than other local judges.

And while he has some defenders, I question this particular defense of Fiore. His complex lit background?? Image
As someone who studies the structure of the criminal justice system--in particular the balance of power between prosecutors and judges--I have a hard time seeing how a complex lit background would aid in answering those questions.

These are con law & local government questions.
I sum, this is a very tricky issue. Some of the same questions are at play right now in the Flynn case.

The @washingtonpost did a good job covering it --- I see the reporter even got a quote from @hashtagblevin

It must be nice to have WaPo as your local newspaper! Image

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More from @CBHessick

Carissa Byrne Hessick Profile picture
12 Oct
At today's Supreme Court confirmation hearing, we will be told that judges are not supposed to make policy decisions.
That statement is entirely false.
The people who wrote our Constitution expected judges to make policy decisions, and that's what they did for a long time. ImageImage
In the years before and after the Constitution was ratified, judges and non-judges alike had no doubt that judges could make policy. This was the whole idea behind the "common law" that they had brought with them in England. Judges even had the power to create new crimes. ImageImageImage
The power of judges to set policy came under attack when partisan battles between the Federalists and the Democrats began to play out in federal court prosecutions for common law crimes. Once the Federalists lost their hold on the courts, the Court curtailed that power. ImageImage
Read 7 tweets
Carissa Byrne Hessick Profile picture
21 Sep
If your criticism about a potential Supreme Court nominee is her religion, can I kindly suggest that you look in the mirror and think about when you decided that religious discrimination is okay.
To all the folks in my mentions telling me that it’s just one *type* of Catholicism that you think makes someone unfit for office/likely to impose her religious views on others—-that’s still religious discrimination.
The replies to this are making my stomach churn. But I’ll give it one last shot for those who are insisting that Coney Barrett’s kingdom of god quote means she will force her religion on others.

Have you heard religious people talk about their faith before?
Read 5 tweets
Carissa Byrne Hessick Profile picture
28 Aug
The Trump/Pence "law and order" campaign argument is based on a claim that Democrats support rioters or are at least unwilling to do much about them.

But there's actually a big split among folks on the left about whether to cut police budgets and how to respond to violence.
There are some elected officials, like people on city councils in Minneapolis and Seattle, who want to cut police funding.

But other Democratic officials--including Biden and Congressional leadership--who have repeatedly said they oppose those efforts.
There are also divisions within local governments on these issues. For example, earlier this week the Seattle mayor vetoed the city council's budget, which had included significant cuts to the Seattle PDs budget.
Read 11 tweets
Carissa Byrne Hessick Profile picture
27 Aug
This article does a good job pointing out the inherently illogical argument at the core of the Trump/Pence “law and Order” claim in favor of their re-election. They point to lawlessness occurring now as something that will happen if Biden is elected. nytimes.com/2020/08/27/us/…
There is, of course, more to their re-election claim: That Trump can’t stop what’s happening now because Democrats control the cities. That electing Biden will make things even worse. But the claim still isn’t logical.
In addition to the lack of logic, the re-election claim also misses something important--something that I hope the media coverage of the claim can add:
Sending in the National Guard and big federal interventions like Operation Legend probably aren't going to be very effective.
Read 7 tweets
Carissa Byrne Hessick Profile picture
12 Aug
It’s an admittedly small sample size, but all of the actual prosecutors that I’ve talked to say that Kamala Harris was a progressive prosecutor.

It’s the folks who aren’t prosecutors who insist she wasn’t.
Lots of non-prosecutors are responding to this tweet by insisting that Harris was not a progressive prosecutor.

Others are insisting that prosecutors, as a group, aren’t to be trusted to determine who is a progressive prosecutor and who is not.
I don’t have a good answer for the question of how we know who’s a progressive prosecutor and who is not.

Part of the difficulty, I think, lies in the murkiness of that label. Aside from listing particular people, it’s not clear who qualifies and who does not.
Read 13 tweets
Carissa Byrne Hessick Profile picture
5 Aug
This passage from @AWeissmann_ in the Atlantic is astounding. The idea that prosecutors “cannot ignore or invent facts” to ensure that a defendant receives a certain sentence is so entirely at odds with what routinely happens in criminal cases, I can’t believe he said it.
The error in this passage isn’t just an ambiguity or overstatement. Weissmann says that pretending as though the facts of a case were less serious than they actually were isn’t permitted because prosecutors can’t lie and say facts were more serious. But that argument is crazy.
As a constitutional matter, prosecutors have great power to be lenient. When they refuse to indict, dismiss charges, and offer favorable plea bargains, their power in these matters isn’t absolute—but it’s awfully close.

Their power to be harsh, on the other hand, is more limited
Read 21 tweets

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