In New York, a rogue attorney general promotes himself rather than justice

It can’t have escaped New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s notice that the voters in his state like to promote racket-busting prosecutors into higher office. It’s happened so often it’s almost become cliché, from Tom Dewey to Rudy Giuliani and beyond.

The problem, though, is that the canon of legal ethics holds that a prosecutor’s first job is not to win in court, but to pursue justice. Just as much care must be shown to ensure the innocent are not brought to trial as is taken to win convictions of the guilty. It’s a dichotomy that argues against novel interpretations of the law and groundbreaking, risk-taking prosecutions like the ones that are so familiar to us all, not from real life but from television.