Haag Slaying

Your editorial concerning the district attorney’s handling of the homicide of Myron Haag asked the question whether the legal action of the district attorney was synonymous with moral action. Unfortunately, the tenor of the editorial implied that the district attorney’s proper legal action was not necessarily moral action because it did not meet the community’s expectation of justice.

While acknowledging that legal principles clearly rendered a criminal prosecution inappropriate, you seemed unconvinced that for the district attorney to reject the case in lieu of charging and having a “judge decide the matter” or presenting “the case to a grand jury,” would have been inappropriate. The implication made by your editorial points up a fundamental lack of understanding of the prosecutorial power and the legal and moral role of the district attorney in the criminal justice system.

The public expectation of justice should be that a district attorney will act ethically and be governed by established legal principles when exercising power to charge or reject criminal cases. To act otherwise or strictly in response to a perception of the “community’s expectation of justice,” would be the immoral course.

Ethical principles for charging crimes require that before issuing a charge, the prosecutor must be satisfied that there is sufficient evidence to convict the potential defendant. They prohibit consideration of the position of the victim, the mere fact of a request to charge by a police agency, private citizen or victim, or public and journalistic pressure to charge. For a prosecutor to act contrary to these basic and common sense principles would be unethical and immoral.

The district attorney’s handling of Haag’s death actually transcends the issue of morality and demonstrates political courage. Haag was a stalwart of his community, a good man, senselessly killed in front of his own home at the hands of an antagonistic teen-ager with a troubled past. The situation called for and received careful scrutiny for possible judicial action. The public opinion and media pressure was there. The power to prosecute was there. What was not there was the evidence and the law to justify charging a crime.

MICHAEL R. PENT, Deputy District Attorney Chief, Special Operations Division