The Patriot Post® · Charges Against Global Warming Activists Dismissed

Jeff Jacoby: “Sam Sutter, the district attorney for Bristol County [Massachusetts], announced [recently] that he would drop the criminal charges pending against two global-warming activists for illegally blocking a shipment of coal to a power plant… He announced, in a manner calculated to attract maximum publicity, that he was letting [the demonstrators] off the hook because he agrees with their political views. … It was an egregious abuse of his authority as a prosecutor: not that he dropped the charges against two lawbreaking protesters, but that he did so because he wants to promote their controversial cause – and to promote his own ‘leadership’ on the issue. … It may be tempting for those who see climate change as a crisis to applaud Sutter’s overtly political decision. Would they feel the same way about an anti-abortion DA who refused to prosecute demonstrators for blockading a Planned Parenthood clinic? Would they cheer a prosecutor whose antipathy to Islam led him to drop the charges against trespassers preventing construction of a mosque, and then to trumpet his ‘leadership’ in doing so? Prosecutors aren’t elected to make public policy – not on fossil fuels, or civil rights, or abortion, or anything else.”