The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice

This book should be a must-read for every first-year law student as well as for those in law enforcement at all levels. Roberts and Stratton make the case for how law enforcement and the courts trample the rights of citizens and endanger the public safety, not to mention destroying our founding document, the Constitution of the U.S. Be prepared to get angry at the unfairness dealt to ordinary, law-abiding citizens who cannot possibly know every nuance of every law passed by every community and state in the U.S., let alone the constantly changing federal law. This book will both outrage and inform the ordinary citizen.

~The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice~ is a solid critique of our nation's criminal justice system, which has strayed egregiously from its fundamentals and is continuously assailing the Rights of the Englishmen and the constitutional protections of our citizenry. "Good intentions have transformed law," note the authors, "from a shield for the innocent to a weapon used by the police. Having lost the law, we have acquired tyranny." With increasing lawlessness, the nefarious tactics of law enforcement are increasingly becoming indistinguishable from those of the "criminal underworld." The Anglo-American common law tradition is losing ground to zealous prosecutors, insensitive regulators, and overly ambitious law enforcement. They are increasingly blinded by ambition and lacking any ethical sense of fairness and integrity as many seldom afford dignity or concern for those they investigate. The onset of the book highlights the cherished Rights of the Englishmen and offers a little legal history and some jurisprudence lessons. Innocent people are increasingly caught up in a bureaucratic web where vindictive prosecutors and uncaring bureaucrats destroy lives and livelihoods. As the authors make clear, the reason for abuses which are prevalent perhaps owes to a loss of the sense of justice. "The function of justice is to serve truth." When the quest for truth is lost, the focus on justice is dispensed with, and ambition of bureaucrats and prosecutors runs roughshod over the rights of the accused. In earlier times, the honor of the legal profession compelled prosecutors to have the utmost respect for the individual: "They respected people's reputations, and English judges wanted no innocent blood on their conscience... Their abhorrence of convicting the innocent was reinforced by religious beliefs of the age, such as accountability before God and the afterlife, and bad experiences with arbitrary judicial practices, such as Star Chamber proceedings in which due process and evidentiary standards were absent." In more recent times, prosecutors "will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted," notes Robert Jackson in 1940. This U.S. Attorney General and later Supreme Court Justice offered a ubiquitous warning of the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: "With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least some technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime... it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm-in which prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greate

Excerpts from a book review by Nikos A. Leverenz in The Independent Review (Fall 2001)The Tyranny of Good Intentions should make those who participate in our political and legal systems uncomfortable, if not self-loathing. Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M Stratton's principal argument is that what passes for "law" in the current civil climate is far removed from the "long struggle to establish the people's sovereignity" that dates back to pre-Norman England. Simply put, the law has been transformed from a shield that protects the people from the encroachments of government power into a sword that enables the government to lord over people. Those who are weary of the ongoing government assault on Microsoft and the tobacco industry or of the continued evisceration of civil liberties under the tutelary banner of the drug war should immediately recognize this transformation. The Tyranny of Good Intentions highlights two broad areas in which the content and enforcement of the law now serve as a sword against what is loosely termed "the Rights of Englishmen": namely, "prohibitions against crimes without intent, retroactive law, and self-incrimination." First, the authors consider how government prosecutors, manifesting a win-at-all-costs mentality, sacrifice the quest for truth in order to advance their careers. Second, the adbication of legislative power to administrative agencies has eroded the Anglo-Saxon legal maxim "a delegated power cannot itself be delegated."Those who are actively engaged in policymaking and law enforcement would do well to read The Tyranny of Good Intentions, even if it gives them only momentary pause in their assorted "public interest" crusades to leave hoof prints on the people's constitutional liberties.

Though I am not an attorney I have several friends who are attorneys. One of them gave me a copy of this wonderful book by Roberts and Stratton three weeks ago. After looking at the book for two weeks I picked it up and read it it two sessions. There are enough facts in the book that I am already familiar with to know in my gut that these two fellows are right on target. Their research and conclusions are troubling, but true. It takes a real piece of work to get men as diverse as Alan Dershowitz, Gordon Liddy and Milton Friedman to recommend a work like this. But this book is a piece of work, the most important book I've read this year and the Christmas present I plan on giving my thinking friends.

A fascinating analysis of the origins of the police state arising out of America's bureaucracy. As the authors present it, the Constitution has become an relic for the history books. Ordinary people are routinely crushed by viciousness on the part of US Government employees who act with a sense of mission, and without a sense of proportion. This is not a first person account, but a well researched journalistic attempt to tie together disturbing trends that most people see as isolated events. As one who has experienced a Mad Dog Prosecutor (and written a first-person account of it), I can state that this book is far from exaggerated in its description of the abuse of ordinary and honest people by our government. The constitutional protections we were taught all about in school have become a fiction.