Snitchin' ain't easy

 Jennis Ellis has turned State against the former president and her former client.  According to the AP:

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign attorney Jenna Ellis, who worked closely with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, will cooperate with Arizona prosecutors in exchange for charges being dropped against her in a fake electors case, the state attorney general’s office announced Monday.

Ellis has previously pleaded not guilty to fraud, forgery and conspiracy charges in the Arizona case. Seventeen other people charged in the case have pleaded not guilty to the felony charges — including Giuliani, Trump presidential chief of staff Mark Meadows and 11 Republicans who submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring Trump had won Arizona.

“Her insights are invaluable and will greatly aid the State in proving its case in court,” Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement. “As I stated when the initial charges were announced, I will not allow American democracy to be undermined — it is far too important. Today’s announcement is a win for the rule of law.”

In other news, Rumpole posted the NYT interview with Justice Gorsuch.

Some interesting stuff re criminal justice:

French: Well, one way I’ve heard that described is that complexity is a subsidy for the wealthy. That complexity is a subsidy for the powerful. In other words, large corporations, well-connected individuals, wealthy individuals can navigate all of the red tape. But the ordinary American really struggles, and sometimes the ordinary American can even struggle to interpret criminal law.

This was an interesting element of the book to me and something that people who are not familiar with your jurisprudence might not know — it’s that you’ve long been a champion of the rights of criminal defendants. It struck me that some of the stories here in the book, of the way in which the complexity of criminal law has impacted people, are among the most potent in making the point. Is there a particular story about the abuse of criminal law that stands out to you as you’re reflecting back on the work?

Gorsuch: I would say Aaron Swartz’s story in the book might be one example. Here’s a young man, a young internet entrepreneur, who has a passion for public access to materials that he thinks should be in the public domain. And he downloads a bunch of old articles from JSTOR.

His lawyer says it included articles from the 1942 edition of The Journal of Botany. Now, he probably shouldn’t have done that, OK?

But JSTOR and he negotiated a solution, and they were happy. And state officials first brought criminal charges but then dropped them. Federal prosecutors nonetheless charged him with several felonies. And when he refused to plea bargain — they offered him four to six months in prison, and he didn’t think that was right — he wanted to go to trial.

What did they do?

They added a whole bunch of additional charges, which exposed him to decades in federal prison. And faced with that, he lost his money, all of his money, paying for lawyers’ fees, as everybody does when they encounter our legal system. And ultimately, he killed himself shortly before trial. And that’s part of what our system has become, that when we now have, I believe, if I remember correctly from the book, more people now serving life sentences in our prison system than we had serving any prison sentence in 1970. And today — one more little item I point out — one out of 47 Americans is subject to some form of correctional supervision (as of 2020).

French: You speak in the book about coercive plea bargaining, this process where a prosecutor will charge somebody and then agree to a much reduced sentence on the condition that they don’t take it to trial, that they go ahead and plead guilty, or sometimes when they refuse to plead guilty, they’ll add additional charges. This is something that a lot of critics of the criminal justice system have highlighted for some time. Do you see a remedy?

Gorsuch: Well, I’m a judge, and I’m going to apply the laws we the people pass. That’s my job. In the book, I just wanted to highlight to “we the people” some of the changes that I’ve seen in our law during my lifetime, and plea bargaining during my lifetime has skyrocketed. It basically didn’t exist 50 or 100 years ago, and now 97 percent or so of federal criminal charges are resolved through plea bargaining.

And I just have some questions. What do we lose in that process? We lose juries. Juries are wise, right? And they’re a check both on the executive branch and prosecutors and they’re a check on judges, too, right? And the framers really believed in juries. I mean, there it is in Article III. There it is in the Sixth Amendment. There it is in the Seventh Amendment. They really believed in juries, and we’ve lost that.

And another thing about juries, when you lose juries: Studies show that people who sit on juries — nobody likes being called for jury service. But studies show that after jury service, people have a greater respect for the legal system, for the government, and they participate more in their local governments.