On 07/11/2013, at 8:19 AM, knowknot at mindspring.com wrote:
> an important element of plaintiff's attempted case is the allegation, which appears to be true, that the local D.A. endorsed then facilitated what they and the doctors did so that it is correlatively obvious that he would not prosecute any of them for any crime relating to the plaintiff and, OTOH, the authority to investigate and decide whether to prosecute for that and for all other crimes is relegated exclusively to the essentially not reviewable discretion of the relevant prosecutor.
That's why the English (and Australian) retention of the traditional right to launch a private prosecution of criminal charges is a good thing. Though it is very rare, and even rarer for such prosecutions to actually succeed, the very fact they are a possibility tempers the passive abuse of power inevitable where officials have a monopoly over the right to enforce the law.
Decades ago a friend of mine carried out a private prosecution of someone who deliberately ran him off the road on an isolated bush road. It was a politically motivated attack, related to the long running forest protest thing, anyhows the cops refused to prosecute the perpetrator,a well-known local identity, but my mate managed to convince Legal Aid to fund a private prosecution. There was no guilty verdicts, but the case went all the way to verdict, so that was still a decent outcome. Let the scallywag know that just because the local cops were mates he drinks down the pub with, he isn't immune from the law.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas