04/03/2025
Another major victory for the office! A client who was the victim of an insidious and unsupported charge by the state Attorney General’s Office had her case dismissed after intense motions practice, not the least of which was a defense motion to dismiss for lack of probable cause. She was, and remains, completely innocent.
While the outcome for our client is worth celebrating, and I am grateful for the Attorney General’s Office - in the end - doing the right thing and dismissing the case, my client nonetheless remains another of untold, uncounted, and un-storied Americans who have had their lives thrown in chaos, or destroyed, because a single prosecutor thought they knew what the truth was, despite the evidence.
It really IS easy for a prosecutor to charge a person with a crime. Prosecutors can be dogmatic, under pressure from multiple sources, irrational, vindictive, un-provably unethical, inexperienced, and downright bonkers.
Probable cause is a very low standard to support a criminal charge. An accusation can be enough, true or false. State courts in Montana - and in many others - do not have grand juries that decide criminal charges in felony case (as is done federally). Instead, a prosecutor need only write up an affidavit of probable cause based on - or cut and pasted from - the arresting officer’s report or affidavit of probable cause. Every word of it then taken as true, a judge must only find a “mere probability” that the accused committed the offense. That is all that stands between your life as it is now, and arrest, legal fees you may not be able afford, pre-trial incarceration, expensive pre-trial “monitoring”, life-disrupting and unnecessary bond conditions, public humiliation and ridicule, loss of jobs, careers, family, friends, reputation, retirement savings, etc…and on and on and on. Did I mention the extraordinary anxiety and stress of one’s future and liberty yet to remain under assault and hang like the darkest of clouds over them for what could be years.
And not just being sued for one’s freedom by a small law firm. No, a heavily resourced cross-discipline, cross-agency conglomerate of investigators who will commit resources in proportion to one’s “defiance” of admitting their accusations in service of “getting you”, sometimes by means they justify in their own minds.
The prosecution culture in Montana is deeply lacking in its understanding of how they are professionally required to wield their awesomely consequential powers.
It’s not a game. Human beings are not a file to be gotten through by whomever may be the “charging attorney” that day but also who knows they won’t be actually prosecuting the case.
Most people don’t realize the immense power prosecutors have to assert leverage over people by many different means. Over-charging, filing odious petitions to revoke bond, sitting on potential charges until a defendant refuses to plead guilty (or has the audacity to demand their right to a jury trial), drumming up charges against a spouse or family member. It’s a long list. Some of these things victims may never recover from, regardless of the final outcome of their case.
I wish this wasn’t the case, but this is just going to get worse.
Prosecutors know their immunity puts them outside the possibility of consequences to almost anything they do.
I just wish people knew the devastation some of these prosecutors leave in their wake. I see it every day. I wish it would stop. People should at least know how easily it can happen to them or someone they love.
