Rerun

Protests following the death of an African-American man in police custody continue but the level of rioting and violence seems to have lessened somewhat. Curfews and National Guard patrols give rioters a smaller window to hijack the message of those exercising their freedom to speak and peaceably assemble.

I don't like to be a gloom-and-doom person, but I think the possibility of a repeat of this kind of violence some months down the road increased over the last several days with the appointment of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison as the lead prosecutor in the case of the four officers involved in the death. Ellison previously served as a member of the United States House of Representatives and as the deputy chairman of the Democratic Party.

As Andrew McCarthy notes in a longer piece today at National Review, Ellison amped up the charges originally filed against one officer by the local district attorney. In so doing, he may have made his job harder. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor who won convictions against a dozen people in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, so he has a bit of experience in high-profile cases.

McCarthy suggests that Ellison may have over-charged the police officers and so increased the chances that a jury may not find them guilty. Not because they're not guilty in the death, but because they're not guilty of the specific crime with which they are charged. I, for example, have been guilty from time to time of driving faster than the permitted speed on this or that roadway. If I were to be charged for that offense, I would very probably be convicted. If, however, the prosecutor decided to charge me with participating in a multi-vehicle assault on a New Jersey toll bridge, I would not be convicted, because 1) It was a fictional event and 2) I was 11 years old at the time. By over-charging me, the prosecutor made it hard for a jury that wants to follow the law to find me guilty, even though I actually am guilty of a similar included offense under the law.

"Allahpundit," a contributor to the Hot Air blog, makes a similar case but notes that even the third degree murder charge originally filed has features that could make a conviction tough -- again, not because the officer is not at fault but because a conviction requires certain things to have happened as described in a statute.

Overcharging happens a lot, especially when prosecutors find themselves dealing with high-profile cases. The attorneys who went after the wealthy parents who bought their kids' way into college staged morning guns-out FBI raids and demanded jail time for crimes that did not merit it, prosecutors of bygone days demanded lockups for people who had miniscule amounts of drugs on hand, and so on.

Ordinarily it means that the prosecutor looks like a preening twit to everyone but his or her own mirror, but with relatively little harm done to anyone but the overcharged person. As we have seen, though, this matter is one that a variety of bad actors will use as cover for violence and destruction. The idea that they would greet an acquittal with anything different or with anger properly directed at Ellison's office stupid grandstanding is very very unlikely. I wish it were otherwise, but this may not be the last round.