> How many software engineers or their professional peers have been nudged, pushed or shoved into committing suicide because of a broken build?
It wasn't my shitty analogy to begin with. You're missing the point: getting one prosecutor fired won't change anything, because everyone above and below that prosecutor will continue operating the exact same way.
getting one prosecutor fired won't change anything
Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. But de-throning that one prosecutor will, in her own words, serve as a message [0] to others of her kind that reckless, power-drunk actions have real-world repercussions.
> "But de-throning that one prosecutor will, in her own words, serve as a message"
No, it won't. People respond to risks and rewards, and we've shown amply over the years that the severity of punishment has little deterrent effect on future offenses if the odds of getting caught aren't high enough.
In other words, by throwing one prosecutor to the wolves, we have no inspired any behavioral change in other prosecutors, because we've shown that once every few decades we will punish one person - and that's stacked against the systemic pressures they face to prosecute as many people as vigorously as possible, every day.
This is the same reason why the death sentence, as severe as it is, has basically no effect on crime rates, because it's not handed out with enough regularity to be a deterrent (whether or not we should have the death sentence is another story altogether).
To achieve the "message sending" you want, we will have to regularly investigate many prosecutors, such that the odds of escaping their reckless prosecutorial actions are low. This is what most other people call "changing the system" ;)
Outlier one-offs is just compounding tragedy upon tragedy.
The federal government is more or less designed to function by sacrificing pawns over these kinds of controversies without ever addressing the policies, cultures, or root causes that led to those controversies in the first place. And this goes all the way up to the cabinet level. Sacking one federal prosecutor will do nothing. Even sacking Eric Holder wouldn't change anything--I can't remember a single attorney general who was worth a damn and the first one I remember is Janet Reno.
It wasn't my shitty analogy to begin with. You're missing the point: getting one prosecutor fired won't change anything, because everyone above and below that prosecutor will continue operating the exact same way.