Discover the Networks

Overview

The following text is excerpted from a document titled “‘Progressive’ Prosecutors Sabotage the Rule of Law, Raise Crime Rates, and Ignore Victims,” authored by Charles Stimson and Jack Smith, and published by The Heritage Foundation on October 29, 2020.

The American prosecutor occupies a unique role among lawyers. The prosecutor has a higher duty than other attorneys. His duty is to seek justice, not simply to obtain convictions. As the American Bar Association notes, “The prosecutor should seek to protect the innocent and convict the guilty, consider the interests of victims and witnesses, and respect the constitutional and legal rights of all persons, including suspects and defendants.”

Prosecutors play a vital and indispensable role in the fair and just administration of criminal law. As members of the executive branch at the local, state, or federal level, they, like all other members of the executive branch, take an oath to support and defend the Constitution and faithfully execute the law as written. They do not make laws. That is the duty of the legislative branch.

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The so-called progressive prosecutor movement—or, as we refer to it, the “rogue prosecutor” movement—upends the traditional and customary role of the prosecutor in American society with short-term and potentially long-term disastrous consequences on a number of levels.

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The rogue prosecutor movement has been vocal about its goals. The movement consists of donors, candidates for district attorney, elected rogue prosecutors, and academics and activists. Those recruited by the movement to run for office tout their “progressive” bona fides and suggest that we need to “reimagine” a better criminal justice system.

It is a serious movement in large part because leftist billionaire George Soros has dumped and continues to dump tens of millions of dollars into specific DA races and into dark-money PACs that identify, recruit, and fund criminal defense attorneys to run against independent law-and-order prosecutors.

Academics, mostly in the form of law review articles, support and defend the movement.

The rogue prosecutor movement has a variety of goals, but its principal three aims are to:

Replace independent progressive and traditional prosecutors, who follow the law and believe in protecting victims’ rights and ensuring public safety, with criminal defense attorneys and activists who are beholden to the movement;

Usurp the constitutional role of the legislative branch by refusing to prosecute entire categories of crimes; and

End cash bail for all crimes.

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Another common trait of the rogue prosecutor movement is the inflammatory claim that the entire criminal justice system is systemically racist. They claim that independent, real progressive and traditional prosecutors are “reluctant to criticize the police,” are “unable or unwilling to bring charges or seek convictions against police officers,” and are “complicit in officer perjury.”

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This well-funded and organized movement is not about liberal v. conservative, Democrat v. Republican, black v. white, or one law-and-order prosecutor against another. This movement is about power. It is about a handful of billionaires manipulating the criminal justice system with large amounts of cash.

On July 31, 2022, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed in which George Soros defended his advocacy on behalf of radical prosecutors. Some excerpts:

Like most of us, I’m concerned about crime. One of government’s most important roles is to ensure public safety. I have been involved in efforts to reform the criminal-justice system for the more than 30 years I have been a philanthropist.

Yet our system is rife with injustices that make us all less safe. […] We need to acknowledge that black people in the U.S. are five times as likely to be sent to jail as white people. That is an injustice that undermines our democracy.

We spend $81 billion every year keeping around two million people in prisons and jails. We need to invest more in preventing crime with strategies that work—deploying mental-health professionals in crisis situations, investing in youth job programs, and creating opportunities for education behind bars. This reduces the likelihood that those prisoners will commit new crimes after release.

In recent years, reform-minded prosecutors and other law-enforcement officials around the country have been coalescing around an agenda that promises to be more effective and just. This agenda includes prioritizing the resources of the criminal-justice system to protect people against violent crime. It urges that we treat drug addiction as a disease, not a crime. And it seeks to end the criminalization of poverty and mental illness. […]

Some politicians and pundits have tried to blame recent spikes in crime on the policies of reform-minded prosecutors. The research I’ve seen says otherwise. The most rigorous academic study, analyzing data across 35 jurisdictions, shows no connection between the election of reform-minded prosecutors and local crime rates. In fact, violent crime in recent years has generally been increasing more quickly in jurisdictions without reform-minded prosecutors. Murder rates have been rising fastest in some Republican states led by tough-on-crime politicians.

Serious scholars researching causes behind the recent increase in crime have pointed to other factors: a disturbing rise in mental illness among young people due to the isolation imposed by Covid lockdowns, a pullback in policing in the wake of public criminal-justice reform protests, and increases in gun trafficking. Many of the same people who call for more-punitive criminal-justice policies also support looser gun laws.

This is why I have supported the election (and more recently the re-election) of prosecutors who support reform. I have done it transparently, and I have no intention of stopping. The funds I provide enable sensible reform-minded candidates to receive a hearing from the public.

In 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris voiced her strong support for “progressive prosecutors … who can show what is possible and then show that it works, and show that frankly, it’s not contrary at all to public safety, [but that] in fact, it is a better way.”

Additional Resources:

Profiles of Radical Prosecutors

* Asterisk signifies that the individual has been supported by George Soros.

Ayala, Aramis (State Attorney in Florida’s 9th Circuit, 2017-2021) *
Becton, Diana (DA in Contra Costa County, CA) *
Biberaj, Buta (CA of Loudoun County, VA) *
Boudin, Chesa (DA in San Francisco, CA) *
Bragg, Alvin (DA in New York, NY) *
Clegg, David (DA in Ulster County, NY) *
Colom, Scott (DA of Sixteenth Circuit Court of MS) *
Creuzot, John (DA in Dallas County, TX) *
Dehghani-Tafti, Parisa (CA of Arlington County and Falls Church, VA) *
Descano, Steve (DA in Fairfax County, VA) *
Fatehi, Ramin (CA of Norfolk, VA) *
Foxx, Kimberly (SA of Cook County, IL) *
Gardner, Kimberly (DA in St. Louis, MO) *
Garza, Jose (DA in Travis County, TX) *
Gascon, George (DA in Los Angeles County, CA) *
Gonzales, Joe (DA in Bexar County, TX) *
Krasner, Larry (DA in Philadelphia, PA) *
Morales, Stephanie (CA of Portsmouth, Virginia) *
Mosby, Marilyn (DA in Baltimore, MD) *
Ogg, Kim (DA in Harris County, TX) *
Owens, Jody E. (DA of Hinds County, MS) *
Rollins, Rachael (DA in Suffolk County, MA, and U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts) *
Stollsteimer, Jack, (DA of Delaware County, PA) *
Torrez, Raul (DA of District Attorney of Bernalillo County, NM) *
Warren, Andrew (13th Judicial Circuit, FL) *
Worrell, Monique (State Attorney in Orange County, FL) *