I wholeheartedly agree. It's understandable that after a tragic, upsetting event like this people look for someone to blame. If you are looking for someone to blame, blame the law. Prosecutors take cases they think they can win. No prosecutor wants to lose a case. The decision to take a case is made based on the law and precedent.
Getting a DA fired solves nothing. What happens once you have achieved it? What have you accomplished? The law remains the same, and these type of cases continue to be brought.
Change is difficult. But I hope that if people really cared about this they would put as much effort as they can into changing the law, rather than trying to place the blame on a single individual - because the latter can easily result in even more misunderstandings.
Unfortunately this conflicts with the reality of Federal law in the US, where prosecutorial discretion is essentially the beginning and end of the criminal law system.
At any given time, any person and any company could be easily convicted of enough serious crimes to put them in prison for life or out of business. Prosecutors don't pick cases; they pick defendants, based on what are hopefully well-intended criteria. They then go through the extensive but essentially mechanical process of the justice system, which hopefully at least serves to shine enough daylight on the matter that prosecutor misbehavior is hard to hide.
Saying we should not pressure them to pick in a way we would prefer is to abandon the only actual influence over the system we have.
Only a person of science or other black/white thinker would assume that law and procedure was an "essentially mechanical process." I once imagined it that way too. The very first thing a law student is taught is that everything is a grey area: laws are left vague deliberately in order to be interpreted by judges; evidence and procedure are negotiable; everything is subjective. The legal framework is only that, a framework. The legal machine is far, far from deterministic. It is designed from the top down to be discretionary.
Otherwise you'd more often run into situations where you couldn't prosecute someone because a statute didn't spell out their exact actions even though in spirit they had violated it.
What happens if you're in a grey area? You spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars defending yourself, and you might be found innocent of the more serious charges, but there's a good chance you'll be convicted on one or two minor charges. You're still out the money you payed to your lawyers, and the prosecutor gets to say, "We didn't get the outcome we wanted, but the evildoer was still held to account for his crimes."
Yeah, the reality for the accused is that the system is rather black and white. Either you are not on their radar... or you are fucked. How fucked you are is really the only gradient here.
I actually agree with both of you. The system is so subjective that if you are rightly or wrongly ensnared by it, you always lose at a minimum, money. Civil cases are even more likely to occur because effectively anyone from an employee to a patent troll can play "prosecutor" and again the question is only how much it'll ultimately cost.
Getting a DA fired solves nothing. What happens once you have achieved it? What have you accomplished? The law remains the same, and these type of cases continue to be brought.
Change is difficult. But I hope that if people really cared about this they would put as much effort as they can into changing the law, rather than trying to place the blame on a single individual - because the latter can easily result in even more misunderstandings.