Vote for the candidate with courage

The Johnson County attorney race is bringing out many important topics that are usually not discussed locally in any significant depth. One of these topics is prosecutorial discretion.

John Zimmerman is running in the Democratic primary (election is Tuesday) on a platform that, among other things, emphasizes the power of the county attorney to dismiss cases where prosecuting someone would not benefit the community, in particular in regard to 'victimless” crimes such as possession of small amounts of marijuana and public intoxication.

The incumbent, Janet Lyness, on the other hand, is claiming that since she took an oath to uphold the laws of the state of Iowa, she has no choice but to prosecute all cases for which there are laws on the books.

As much as some of us would like to obtain a nuanced understanding of the role and the scope of prosecutorial discretion in the administration of justice, realistically it would require a level of effort that is beyond what we are typically willing to invest in making a decision to support somebody in a local election. So we tend to make that decision based on the opinion of an authoritative figure that we trust.

The fallacy we need to avoid, though, is trusting someone with an obvious stake in the outcome of elections and/or insufficient expertise.

So here's what Dan Johnston, a former Polk County Attorney, state legislator, American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa staff attorney and general counsel for the Criminal Justice Subcommittee of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, has to say about prosecutorial discretion and the role of the county attorney's office:

'It is disingenuous for a prosecutor to deny exercising prosecutorial discretion, and may evidence a failure to screen cases both for their evidentiary and policy merits before they are filed. I participated in an international discussion among prosecutors, and it was clear in those discussions that even the prosecutors in systems that have the principle of ‘legalism' reject cases for their lack of importance to the purposes of the criminal justice system.

'The thing you constantly have to fight in the criminal justice system, whether we are talking about judges, or prosecutors, or parole board members, is the tendency for people to cover their own ass. It's always safer to keep somebody in jail than to let them out, you always worry that if you let somebody out that this person is going to become a serial killer the next week. So they have to have some courage, and my sense is that there is not enough courage in the system these days.”

My take-away here is that Lyness' refusal to acknowledge and unwillingness to exercise prosecutorial discretion in any meaningful way stems from a banal lack of courage - the lack of courage that directly translates into countless wasted dollars, genuinely serious crimes going unpunished, our disgraceful racial disparity stats, and the needlessly derailed lives of those who are least able to defend themselves.

To end the glaring injustices in our justice system, we need to vote for the guy with the courage to do so.

' Aleksey Gurtovoy is a software engineer, civil rights activist, vice president of the Hawkeye Chapter of the ACLU of Iowa, and co-organizer for Zimmerman for County Attorney campaign in Iowa City. Comments: agurtovoy@acm.org