The New York prosecutor's lawsuit - a selective approach to infringments upon prosecutorial discretion. Part IX.

Last year, I have started a series of articles about the lawsuit by the New York District Attorney's Association (a nonprofit corporation) to nip in the bud the law that introduced a separate Commission for Prosecutorial Conduct, unanimously passed by both houses of the state Legislature and used by state lawmakers, and by the state Governor Cuomo, to get re-elected - and then stopped in December on the pretext that a lawsuit challenging the law was made.

Here is the text of the prosecutors' lawsuit.

As to other articles in the series, 

Part I can be read here.

Part II - here.

Part III - here.

Part IV - here.

Part V - here.

Part VI - here.

Part VII - here.

Part VIII is here.

In this part, Part IX, I will continue to analyze the prosecutors' lawsuit, and will touch upon a very interesting aspect of it, prosecutors' claim that the Commission on their conduct will supposedly encroach upon their exclusive discretion to charge or not to charge a crime, I wrote about it already in Part VI, from the point of view of prosecutors' indignation that they would be prevented from criminally charging whistleblowers against their own misconduct, but there is one more aspect to it.

I already covered in my previous articles the double standard of prosecutors in claiming that allegedly the existence of the Commission for Prosecutorial Conduct will violate the "bedrock principle of democracy", the separation of powers, because, by New York State Constitution, only the Chief Executive Officer of the State, the State Governor, has authority to remove prosecutors from office.

I already wrote that, despite that statement, prosecutors are happy with the current status-quo when not the executive branch (the Governor), but the judicial (in violation of that same bedrock principle of separation of powers) is authorized to discipline those same prosecutors and remove them from office by yanking their law licenses.  A double standard.

But, there is one more double standard here.

Contempt of court.

There is such an interesting relic, dating back to the 12th-century England, long before the U.S. emerged and long before the U.S. Constitution (that every judge and prosecutor are sworn to uphold) was adopted.

While prosecutors claim that their authority to charge or not charge, prosecute or not prosecute crimes is there exclusive authority, and attack the law that so much as allows a body investigating prosecutors' misconduct (that so far have racked up a giant number of wrongful convictions in the state of New York) to "encroach" upon that prosecutorial discretion - by giving immunity from prosecution to witnesses of prosecutorial misconduct.  Prosecutors are upset that the law has stripped them from their ability to retaliate against witnesses against them, by fabricating criminal proceedings against them.

But, they are, same as with the removal from office issue, absolutely ok to allow judges to charge people with contempt of court "committed in the judge's presence" - and to act as a complaining alleged victim, witness, prosecutor, jury and judge all in one in such cases.

No problem for the prosecution.

And, no problem for the prosecution that there exists a law in the State of New York allowing (supposedly) private parties, not at all any kind of prosecutors, to bring criminal and quasi-criminal ("civil contempt" which New York courts treat no differently than criminal contempt) charges of contempt of court BY MOTIONS within civil proceedings.

That is not, to those same prosecutors, an encroachment upon their "prosecutorial discretion".

I wonder, why the double standard?

Judiciary Law