Therefore... what? Only independents can be attorneys general? Can be judges? Or nobody can be judges?
Your observation is true, and yet, we kind of need to keep a civilization running, and for that we need courts and stuff. What kind of plan do you have for how things would be different, and will it actually work in the real world?
Great, but you should have more when making charges of bias and corruption than "he's a Democrat, therefore dirty".
When we say someone like a prosecutor is "independent" it means they are not directed by a superior. Bragg is not directed by the mayor of NY, the governor of NY, the AG, or the President. He may be a Democrat, but he's still independent (lower case "i"). If you come in and call him a "Democrat" when someone else calls him independent, you are implying he is a Democrat before anything else, and his actions are driven by allegiance to the party. That's not true.
So can you tell us anything specifically that Bragg did that was not independent, where he was directed by Biden or Democrats?
Or did he prosecute Trump as the law directed him to?
> Or did he prosecute Trump as the law directed him to?
Clearly not. He essentially said "We have to get Trump" before he even found a crime to charge him with. Then invented a "novel legal theory" to prosecute him.
Going to need a source for this. Every source people have pulled up for me so far attempting to "prove" this has Bragg saying something to the effect of "I will follow the facts where they take me". Maybe you have a different source?
> Then invented a "novel legal theory" to prosecute him.
You mean he applied the facts to the law and brought a prosecution where he thought a crime had been committed, as is his job as DA.
Can you explain why "inventing a novel legal theory" is wrong or indicative of bias? Or evidence that Bragg is somehow controlled or not independent?
Ok, I looked it up. His exact words were "we have to hold him accountable". That's a declaration of intent to target Trump.
And he listed his long experience of opposing Trump administration policies. "I also sued the Trump administration more than 100 times... So I know that work". Notice he said "Trump administration" - that was political opposition, he was suing to oppose Trump's policies. Even in his previous position, he was a political opponent of Trump, and used his office to pursue political goals. That's clearly bias.
> Can you explain why "inventing a novel legal theory" is wrong or indicative of bias?
Because legal changes should not be retroactive. If something is currently illegal, it doesn't require a "novel legal theory" to prosecute. Novel legal theory is just a way of saying "let's change the way the law is interpreted or enforced". And that's fine, as long as it's only enforced after the change is made public.
This is the kind of general, anodyne political statement every candidate ever makes. Seriously, if this is the basis we use to overturn cases as evidence of bias, then it would mean every Republican is immune from prosecution from every Democratic DA, and vice versa.
> Notice he said "Trump administration" - that was political opposition, he was suing to oppose Trump's policies. Even in his previous position, he was a political opponent of Trump, and used his office to pursue political goals.
And with this statement you've made the definition of political operative to include everyone in a state government opposed to the policies of the federal government controlled by the opposing party.
So now that you've made everything politics, nothing is politics, and we can get back to the facts at hand.
> Because legal changes should not be retroactive.
There was no legal change, the law was applied as written as it has been to many other individuals.
> If something is currently illegal, it doesn't require a "novel legal theory" to prosecute.
The novelty here is applying new facts to an existing law in a way that hasn't been applied before. That's what people mean when they mean "novel". They don't mean the law is being twisted to fit the facts. They don't mean the law is somehow new or different this time. It's the same as it's always been.
The novelty comes from it being unknown whether or not the facts actually fit the law by virtue of the "theory" being untested in court. This novelty is not unfair to the defendant. It doesn't mean they are being singled out or unfairly targeted for prosecution. It just means the specific facts of the case haven't been tried in this way before, and why should they have been? The facts are unprecedented.
> Novel legal theory is just a way of saying "let's change the way the law is interpreted or enforced". And that's fine, as long as it's only enforced after the change is made public.
No, that's a terrible system. All that means is you can get away with crimes if you are creative enough. You would just have to point to the novelty of the theory, the fact that the law hasn't been applied that way before, and then you'd be free. Then that specific crime would be open season until the bug was patched by legislation, which we all know takes forever. It's like discovering a zero day exploit, advertising it, and then hoping an unspecified patch will fix things at some point in the future. Uh, no that's a recipe for an pwned system, sorry. Novel crimes call for novel applications of the law. Criminals have an asymmetric advantage as it is with the presumption of innocence, there's no reason to give them more of an advantage.
> There was no legal change, the law was applied as written as it has been to many other individuals.
Can you cite a single case before Trump's where this law was applied, as a felony, without actually charging the defendant with the other crime that makes it a felony?
I looked. In the cases I checked, the second crime was charged.
And an honest observer has to wonder why that second crime wasn't charged in this case. Did the prosecution doubt they could prove it?
Even AI has bias from its training data sets, as we've seen from the NUMEROUS controversies of racism and sexism from AI (like ChatGPT) over the last 2 years.
The universe, and its circumstances, has itself a bias towards occurrences we believe to be unfair. Old news.
True, but I imagined GOFAI -- algorithms you can read and write. Something like an expert system. Not LLM "AI". You seriously wouldn't want to trust your freedom and the nation's fate on confabulatory black box neural nets that nobody can understand, right? ;p
The DA, Alvin Bragg, is not independent, he's a Democrat.