The proprietor of “Patterico’s Pontifications” responds in the comments section of this blog (also, apparently, not a fan of mine) thusly:

When I hear the name Radley Balko, I check, and check again.

I suppose it would be naive to think that Patterico, a prosecutor, would have warm and fuzzy feelings for me. So I’ll look over the apparent swipe at my credibility.

Patterico then rehashes the facts of the Gonzolez case I blogged about earlier this week, and concludes with this:

There’s a bit more to this than a guy with a lot of money acting a little funny.

I find Patterico’s cryptic insinuation here pretty interesting. Gonzolez was never even charged with a drug crime, much less convicted. Which means the prosecutors didn’t even have enough evidence to bring the case to trial. Yet the state still took the man’s $125,000, money he had a pretty respectable explanation for, complete with witnesses. That’s not even mentioning the fact that in a free society, a man never charged with a crime shouldn’t have to vouch for the legitimacy of the money he’s carrying, no matter how he happens to be carrying it.

So what exactly does Patterico mean with the wink, wink, nudge, nudge “there’s a bit more to this guy” stuff?

Does he think it’s okay to seize someone’s property even when there’s not enough evidence to charge that person? Does he think nervously misleading a cop during a traffic stop is reason enough to steal the life savings of a group of immigrants and hand it over to the local police department? Is he saying that he, a prosecutor, knows what to look for in these kinds of characters, so we should just trust him on this one and suspend our outrage, because the guy was probably really was a drug dealer?

What does his answer to any of the above questions tell us about how he prosecutes crimes in Los Angeles County?

Given that Patterico is a public servant paid with taxpayer dollars, I’m kinda’ curious to know what exactly he’s getting at.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 4:15 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.