I'm honestly surprised this has led to charges. I eagerly await the qualified immunity argument against this. Before we get too excited, there's lots of ways t

I'm honestly surprised this has led to charges. I eagerly await the qualified immunity argument against this. Before we get too excited, there's lots of ways this can go wrong. People don't understand just how rigged the justice system is not to prosecute authority figures including the police. For example: 1. Manu jurisdictions require felony charges to first be approved by a grand jury. This is meant to protect citizens from spurious felony charges. The grand jury proces empanels a group of people, just like a jury, but they'll only hear evidence that the prosecutor presents. There is no defense counsel. The defendant is not present. Anyone interesting in pursuing a prosecution is not present. So what can go wrong? A prosecutor can intentionally bring a weak case and then hang their hat on the grand jury denying to pursue charges. It happens all the time. Why would a prosecutor do this? Because they rely on the police for prosecutions. If a prosecutor gets a reputation for locking up the police then their police witnesses start getting sick and missing court dates. And that prosecutor's conviction rate goes down, which ultimately is the only thing they care about. 2. Judges often either have a prosecution bias or they outright work for the benefit of the prosecution. There can be multiple reasons for this. Many judges are former prosecutors. Depending on your state, judges may be politicians effectively as they have to campaign for their position or their name is on the ballot to extend their term so narratives like "tough on crime" start appearing. There are three big recent examples of this: 1. The YSL trial in Georgia. The judge had ex-parte meetings with witnesses and the prosecution with no defense cousel present during which a witness was coerced to testify for the prosecution by the judge. That judge was ultimately forced to recuse themselves because thsi was such an egregious breach of the rules; 2. The Karen Reed trial in Massachussetts. This wasn't on the news much but was covered heavily on social media, particularly Tiktok. The list of sins by the prosecutors and judges are really too great to enumerate. 3. Alec Baldwin's trial for the death of a crew member on the set of Rust. The prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. They hid bullets in a file of another case so the defense would never see it. This led to the case being dismissed with prejudice, rightly so. This is what's called a Brady violation [1]. Now because that was a high-profile case that happened. But sometimes the Brady violation is ignored. In a famous Supreme Court case (Connick v. Thomson [2]), the Supreme Court ruled that if just one prosecutor in an office does a Brady violation then it's fine. It's not a systemic problem. Crazy. Now we have had high profile cases where the police have been successfuly prosecuted, most notably Derek Chauvin. But those really are the exception. We're a long way from a conviction. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_disclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_disclosure [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connick_v._Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connick_v._Thompson