EP 365 Are Federal and State Prosecutors Out of Control?

According to our guest, Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor and her co-author, attorney Harvey A. Silverglate, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. In their book ‘Conviction Machine’, they focus on the federal courts, but Ms. Powell makes it clear that there is abuse rampant on all levels as proprietorial overreach is rampant everywhere. More than twenty million Americans have criminal convictions, while nearly one-third of Americans have a criminal record. What made our federal, and state, criminal justice system so dangerously effective at turning citizens into convicts? The Justice Department, the FBI, and Congress have all played a role in this and there are measures that can be taken to check the power to ‘indict a ham sandwich’, as the saying goes. Given that there is wide discretion given to prosecutors, particularly in grand jury settings, the FBI does not have to record interrogations and there are so many laws on the books which unwittingly we all run afoul of daily, it will not be an easy task to reform the system. With much criminal reform going on around the country, primarily at the state level, it would be nice to have many fewer wrongful convictions and unfair sentencing to dramatize in films over the next period in our history. Is it likely? Hear the discussion.

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