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When I read this line,

Prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it.

I thought it made the whole piece. It's quite clear to anyone who follows federal cases that this is exactly what is going on, and it is rather obvious why anything that enables this is perverting justice.

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The trend is pretty scary -- if any given normal activity could conceivably be made into a "crime," then you end up with a sort of underclass of people trying to keep prosecutors and police happy because they know that no matter what they do they could be hauled into court at any moment. That's wrong.

I learned a similar corollary in constitutional law class in college - that Supreme Court justices already have their opinions on issues and their related cases, then go crawling through the previous cases to construct the precedents that support their position rather considering the merits of the individual case. It was unsurprising but disheartening to learn.

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