Radley Balko bids farewell to Kern County California D.A. Ed Jagels:
You’d be hard pressed to find a law enforcement official anywhere in the country who better embodies the worst excesses of America’s sharp turn toward law-and-order crime policy over last 30 years. From expanding the death penalty to eroding the rights of the accused to jacking up prison populations to formulating crime policy around sports metaphors, Jagels created a high-profile position by backing just about every bad crime policy in a generation.
But if history dispenses justice more honorably than Ed Jagels ever did, the boyish-looking D.A. will be most remembered for his role ruining countless lives in perhaps the most shameful of the Reagan-era “tough on crime” debacles: the coast-to-coast sex abuse panic of the 1980s.
It’s because of prosecutors like Jagels—and while few are as successful as Jagels, many are trying—that I don’t automatically assume the prosecutors are the good guys. From Radley’s account, Jagels was a cancer on the California justice system. Yet unlike cancer, he was encouraged to thrive and grow by other people in the system.
Nobody ever held him responsible. Kern county residents paid out millions in settlements for his errors, but Jagels himself escaped scott free. He’s advising one of next year’s candidates for governor.