Former Prosecutors Who Go for the Money
The New York Observer has an article today about white collar prosecutors leaving the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York for the other side. The article, while telling and factual, draws the outline of the real picture, but being a news as opposed to an opinion piece, doesn't explain the dots. I will.
U.S. Attorneys and Assistant U.S. Attorneys leave the office and get picked up by the other side for one reason: the money. The white-shoe firms that hire them believe, justifiably so, they will be a huge draw to the increasing number of white collar defendants. But, it's a promise without substance. Once they leave the Department of Justice, they have no more clout than a lawyer who has never earned a dollar working there. Yet, that's not the real problem.
The real problem is most of these former high-level prosecutors can't make the mental shift. They don't have it in them. They thought they were doing G-d's work for the prosecution and feel more than a tad sleezy about working for the other side. You can read my rant about who is really doing G-d's work here and here where I take Law & Order chief Dick Wolf to task.
The truth is, most prosecutors can never be true defense lawyers. They don't have it in them to empathize with their clients. In the Observer article, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, being heralded in the media and the blogosphere for objecting to Bush's warrantless NSA electronic surveillance program, gives a quote I couldn't even make up to illustrate the point:
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