Public opinion has no place in a legit criminal justice system, legal expert Alan Dershowitz lamented on Newsmax TV, warning America is moving into a dangerous place where politics and cancel culture weaponize prosecution.
"Show me the man, and I'll find you the crime," Dershowitz warned host Carl Higbie on "Saturday Report." "And that's the way our criminal justice system is moving more and more. We're finding crimes after we've been told you have to prosecute someone, so he's a bad person."
Dershowitz talked about a confidential memo from Attorney General William Barr on the Mueller Report that might be released soon, noting Barr knows the law did not support trying to find obstruction of justice with former President Donald Trump amid Democrats' pursuit of their Russia collusion narrative.
"Barr did exactly the right thing: There's no such crimes, obstruction of justice for relationships with Russia," Dershowitz told Higbie. "There's just no crime. You can't find it in any of the any of the case books or any of the criminal law statutes. It's a made-up crime."
It can look bad politically, but sending law enforcement on a political mission is not supported by the letter of the law, Dershowitz continued.
"You could make it a political crime," he said. "It would be a terrible thing if there were collusion between a presidential candidate and a foreign country, but I could search up and down the criminal statute and I wouldn't find one that fit."
The facts did not support prosecution on Russia collusion, Dershowitz added.
"The rule of law requires that you find facts that fit existing statutes, and that hasn't happened here," he said.
Dershowitz pointed to the conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin as being a ostensible miscarriage of justice.
"Look what's happening in the Chauvin case," he said. "Everybody hates Chauvin; they're right: he did a terrible, terrible thing, but he didn't commit murder. He committed manslaughter, but because what he did was so terrible, people are willing, including judges and jurors to distort the law and convict him of something that the law doesn't permit him to be convicted for.
"We're seeing that all the time. Public opinion has too much of an impact on our legal system. And the public opinion can often be very, very one sided, and we have to protect against that."
The politicization in our country are forcing changes on the justice system that are unwarranted, according to Dershowitz.
"Too many civil libertarians, like the American Civil Liberties Union have now become partisan, and you can't count on them to come in, if you're coming in against people who they who they favor or people who they disfavor."
The process has been exposed in their attempts to find criminality connected to Trump's alleged ties to Russia.
"This is purely political," he said. "I don't see any criminal liability growing out of anything that I've seen reported. I have an open mind. There's always the possibility that some criminal action took place, but you can't just have wishful thinking.
"If people wish that Bar and Trump committed a crime, they can't turn it into a crime. You have to look at the facts and look at the law, and it's just not there."
Dershowitz also noted judges have become to politicized and weaponized their powers behind their role.
"It's not the business of a judge to act as an editor and to act as a critic," Dershowitz said. "Judges have a very limited role. Their role is to decide cases and controversies within a limited jurisdiction.
"And these some of these federal judges think they have a roving commission to just go around and correct errors and do the right thing and support the interests of their own partisan political parties. And that's just not right.
Even late, liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of this, Dershowitz said.
"Just before she died, she wrote an important opinion saying that judges don't have a roving commission just to do justice as they define it. They have to obey the law. Judges aren't above the law."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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