Sandra Doorley is beautiful and brilliant, and worthy of both her public popularity and her government position.
But, damn, can she be cynical.
As evidenced by a Channel 8 interview in which she – apparently recently woke to racial injustice – announced that her office – she’s Monroe County district attorney – would stop prosecuting marijuana-possession cases.
“If it’s just possession,” she said, “under two ounces, I will not be charging them.”
The reason? Racial disparity.
With activists and reporters claiming that blacks and Hispanics are four times more likely to be charged with marijuana possession than whites, she claims some moral imperative that supersedes doing her duty.
Which, as I understand it, involves prosecuting accused criminals.
But we’ll get back to that. We still have to deal with the cynicism.
Turns out this is an election year and Rochester-area Republicans – a tribe to which Doorley opportunistically belongs – are nervous about the possibility of a Democrat tidal wave sweeping them into oblivion.
And thus this new pot perspective for Doorley.
With the state legislature probably about to at least decriminalize recreational marijuana, and with her Democratic opponent promising not to prosecute marijuana possessors, and with a television camera being nearby, the district attorney saw the light, and gave the bong a pass.
The cops can charge, but the prosecutor won’t prosecute.
Which is not the way they explained it in social studies class.
But we’ll get back to that.
First the question for Doorley: When were you wrong?
Now, when in the name of racial justice you are taking a pass on marijuana prosecution, or then, when for something near 30 years you prosecuted people for exactly that?
If the prosecution of marijuana offenses has been a war on black people, aren’t you a frontline soldier? And these several years you’ve been either district attorney or first assistant district attorney, did you not perceive then that pot prosecution was wrong?
If it is now immoral to enforce the law, what was it for all the years you’ve done it?
What new racial sensitivity have you developed in the last 20 minutes that leads you to refute the practice of your entire prosecutorial career? Was it one of the activists, or a Cynthia Nixon campaign speech, or a bleeding heart from the evening news?
What is it that, just before an election, right after your opponent made a similar pledge, led you to have this epiphany?
Were you on the road to Damascus? Was there a bright light?
Or is it just political pandering?
Now, back to the principle of the thing.
Who the hell gave Sandra Doorley the right to decide what is or is not the law?
With its myriad faults, the legislature of the state of New York is still the legislature of the state of New York, and it is empowered by the people to write the law, including the criminal law. Each county has a district attorney to prosecute the law, against those who have been charged with violation of the law.
Picking and choosing what does or does not get prosecuted may fall within the unwritten concept of “prosecutorial discretion,” but in principle it is nothing other than the rejection of the will of the people as expressed through their legislature. The people’s elected representatives write the law, the people’s elected functionaries are supposed to follow it.
And not cut the legs out from under the police.
Because an unfortunate consequence of Sandra Doorley’s changing of the rules is that it puts the police in the uncomfortable position of either doing their duty and charging according to the law, or abandoning their oaths and joining Doorley in her rejection of the rule of law. Putting it politely, some of her cop buddies are pretty pissed at her right now.
They can’t believe that she truly feels this way, would misuse her power this way, or would screw them over this way.
Which gets back to the cynicism.
Sandra Doorley’s jump to the left has no political downside for her. It may buy her some votes from people who might otherwise have voted for her Democratic opponent, but so great is the discomfort with her opponent on the part of Republicans and independents that they have nowhere to go, and will stick with her on Election Day.
No matter how disappointed they are with this political stunt.