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Convictions by John Kroger: A Prosecutor’s Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves

I am going to start this review with a disclaimer. I am biased, particularly against prosecutors. I am a public defender, and through years of trench warfare I have wounds enough to have learned to have a healthy skepticism about the difficulty of getting “justice” in the criminal justice system. And I blame a lot of the problems on prosecutors. More than one prosecutor has told me he or she can’t do the right thing, or doesn’t care if my client is innocent, or if the police are lying to make a bad arrest stick.

But in Convictions: A Prosecutor’s Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves, John Kroger reveals his own misgivings about the morality of the federal prosecutor’s job. He writes of a “darker side” of his job and the “ethical obstacle course” that he had to try to navigate. He saw how the FBI kept Mafia members on the government’s payroll and looked away as they continued to commit crimes; and how the DEA allowed a big drug cartel player to stay in business as long as the DEA was allowed to skim ten-fifteen percent off drug money shipments. Kroger discloses how he “secretly grew disgusted” at the moral ambiguity of the job. He became concerned about the vast power the prosecutor wields in the federal criminal system, noting that one federal judge complained that “Congress has cast the federal prosecutor in the role of God.”

Kroger adds, “we want to be idealistic, but in the end we accomplish our jobs through threats. You threaten to send your target to prison for life unless they cooperate; you threaten to send our witnesses to prison if they don’t tell the truth; you threaten your defendant’s spouse with indictment unless your defendant pleads. Over time the suffering witnesses and the suffering you cause begin to change you.”

Kroger’s frank acknowledgment of the ethical problems in the system gives him instant credibility with me. In fact, in the end, there are enough ethical dilemmas explored in the book to justify giving three hours of CLE credit simply for reading Kroger’s book.

There are enough ethical dilemmas explored to justify giving three hours of CLE credit simply for reading Kroger’s book. (more…)