Ending a 21-year career as a prosecutor, Georgia’s DeKalb County District Attorney J. Tom Morgan offers some blunt warnings, says the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
• People increasingly don’t trust cops, meaning that more juries vote to acquit defendants.
• Frustration of victims who don’t see offenders held accountable could invite vigilante justice.
• Many citizens see the war on drugs as misguided and hypocritical.
“I think our whole war on drugs needs to be looked at,” Morgan told the Journal-Constitutions. People see crack cocaine users being sent to prison “and on the other hand you’ve got Rush Limbaugh getting thousands of [prescription pills] and he’s making millions of dollars and he’s out on the street,” he said.
“Juries will no longer hold individuals accountable in drug cases. . . . Juries are telling us that prosecution is not the answer,”
Morgan said.
Morgan has spent most of his adult life putting criminals behind bars. He is nationally recognized as an expert on child abuse. A Democrat who started in the DeKalb district attorney’s office in 1983, Morgan is leaving this Saturday, 11 months before his third term as district attorney was to end. He will work on civil litigation and white-collar crime cases with Balch & Bingham, a Birmingham-based law firm with an office in Buckhead, Ga.
Link: http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/dekalb/0104/25morgan.html