(04-07-2022 07:56 AM)solohawks Wrote: Its kinda scary how different the law is based in your judge
Quite true, and “kinda scary” is actually an understatement.
Some of y’all may know that the Watergate scandals of the 1970s are a special subject of interest for me. In that case, one federal judge (John Sirica) had sufficient seniority that he was able to assign almost all of the Watergate-related cases to his own court. That enabled him to control the judicial outcomes for all those defendants far more than any one judge could have done under normal circumstances.
One of the major defendants in “Watergate” was a man named Charles Colson, a high-ranking aide to President Nixon. Ironically, his case was
*not* assigned to Sirica, for complex reasons outside of Sirica’s control. And as a result, the federal prosecutors knew they would have a much more challenging battle to get Colson convicted. So, they offered Colson a plea bargain that involved pure probation with no prison time (none of the defendants in Sirica’s court were offered that!)
Colson, however, was in the throes of an intense religious conversion. He refused the probation plea-offer and personally insisted on pleading to more serious charges that
*did* involve some prison time. I can only imagine the private reaction of the prosecutors, the judge, or Colson’s own attorneys when they realized what he was doing.
The final irony is that Colson’s religious faith was frequently lampooned in the media as a “jailhouse conversion” even though the conversion happened before he was incarcerated and the prosecutors were offering straight probation. Oh, well!