https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/08/09/rollins-criticizes-south-end-sweeps/SONqbTwoIN8S3Ji3a2VonM/story.html

An increasingly visible and aggressive “homeless” culture (in San Francisco fashion) has been spreading from “Methadone mile” (southeast of the Boston Medical Center) into gentrified streets of the South End. The decay started in 2014 before DA Rollins’s time, when Mayor Walsh suddenly closed the treatment facilities on Long Island (Boston Harbor) without any planning for replacement facilities. The decay has accelerated on her watch, however. A recent police crackdown was prompted by an assault and robbery on a corrections officer (in civilian clothes) on his way to work in the area. South End residents and the Mayor have cheered the police action, but DA Rollins has condemned it.

Homeless advocates accused the police of dumping a homeless man out of his wheelchair and throwing it into a garbage truck. I find the police version more credible– that they did not dump anyone out of a wheelchair, but disposed of some abandoned wheelchairs stained with “bodily substances” and blood.

In effect, DA Rollins acquitted him by reason of insanity, a decision normally left to juries.

If juries applied criminal insanity law literally, they would have to acquit nearly all violent criminals. Fortunately for public safety, jury nullification works here in favor of the prosecution.

Apart from partisanship, corruption, or laziness, another reason not to prosecute is that there really is not enough admissible evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Once a defendant is acquitted, the double-jeopardy doctrine protects him even if more evidence comes in that would prove his guilt.

Perhaps England can tolerate the risks of premature private prosecutions, because they abolished the “double Jeopardy” doctrine for many serious crimes in 2003.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/07/26/district-attorney-rachael-rollins-admits-she-used-not-accurate-information-defend-her-record/qfBnBspm50vKUBtMW9mP0H/story.html

Rollins accused her critics of racially-motivated falsification, eg hiding that her White predecessor had planned to offer the same easy deal to the dog-walker’s assailant. The Globe allowed their reporters to defend themselves.

Here it appears that the DA chose “social justice” over actual justice, and it is sickening. In my view, society has no right to demand that the victim’s loved ones simply accept this result. It has the power to do so–but not the right.

And what of the next person this miscreant harms?