Sometimes prosecutors aren’t so bad.
Earlier this week one dismissed a pot possession case after I persuaded him that he couldn’t, or at least shouldn’t, prevail against my client’s motion to suppress based on an improper vehicle impound and search. What’s crazy is that the written impound policy used by the police agency that stopped my client’s vehicle and impounded it tells its officers that driving while suspended by itself is sufficient grounds to impound a vehicle, and this is the rationale the officers gave my client at the scene for impounding his vehicle over my client’s objection. But this clearly violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, according to the Indiana Supreme Court in Taylor v. State (2006). The prosecutor tells me he’s going to work with the police agency to rewrite their impound procedures so this doesn’t happen again. Good.
What’s also crazy is that, based on an order issued this week in a divorce case by the same judge who presided over the pot possession case, I can’t at all be confident that I would have won the motion to suppress had it been left up to her. What’s frustrating is that her abuse of discretion in the divorce case order, as abusive as it was, only harmed my client by a few hundred dollars, making it uneconomical to appeal. I may do something anyway, just on principle. (Note to self: get out of family law already.)
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One reason judges bother me so much more than prosecutors is that I never had a problem with a prosecutor like I had with Tom Moran; but if I had run into a bad one before, the judges would have done the same thing – ignored it.
A bad prosecutor wouldn’t be nearly the problem it is if judges did their jobs.
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