Too Many of Them Have Been Wrong’: Black Ex-Prosecutor Exposes Misdeeds of Los Angeles Legal System In Volume of Online Stories
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An ex-prosecutor’s online memoir is turning heads in La La Land’s legal community.
By Matt Bruce, Atlanta Black Star
For the past six weeks, a former L.A. County deputy district attorney has authored a series of real life stories detailing his 12-year career at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. He’s releasing the stories on Medium, an open publishing platform, under the pen name Spooky Brown, Esq.
The tales are a diary of disillusionment detailing the power struggle the former prosecutor endured trying to fight the good fight in a powerful assembly-line system of incarceration. He shares four specific stories rife with corruption, callousness, coercion and flat-out lies that he witnessed from police investigators and fellow prosecutors involved in the cases he handled.
“Most of the time, my supervisors have been white, and the people charged have been Black and Brown,” Spooky Brown wrote. “While some of those decisions have been right, too many of them have been wrong — dead wrong.”
The Atlanta Black Star has confirmed Spooky Brown’s true identity and verified he’s been a licensed L.A. County attorney since 2007. We are not identifying him to protect him from retaliation.
(Courtesy of Spooky Brown, Esq)
The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office is the largest local prosecutorial office in the nation, with a brigade of 1,000 attorneys and 300 investigators pushing close to 200,000 cases through the courts each year. The area they serve is the nation’s most populous county, with 10.2 million residents.
Spooky Brown dissects that system in his series of stories. He takes a no-holds-barred approach in the anecdotes, diving headlong into them with headlines like “When Police & Prosecutors Are Partners in Crime” and “When Innocence is Inconvenient.” Last month, Spooky penned an open letter to outgoing L.A. County District Attorney Jackie Lacey, urging her to treat her Black female employees better.
That won’t be necessary much longer. Lacey was voted out of office eight days after he posted the letter…
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