In my opinion, this is really the heart of the matter. It doesn't just give power to the executive branch. If you create and pass a law that potentially makes a significant percentage of the population into criminals, you have a bargaining chip of unprecedented power.
The greatest power that criminal prosecutors have is discretion - the power to charge or not charge any person with a crime. They can, and do on a daily basis, threaten charges that carry significant penalties and essentially force their target to enter into what they call a non-prosecution agreement. These are voluntary agreements, essentially saying that the government will not prosecute you if you follow the terms of the agreement. There are no rules for what the government can ask of the target in these agreements. They can quite literally require anything the government wants of the target - even things that a judge could not legally impose upon a guilty defendant to do as part of a criminal sentence.
They can't throw hundreds of millions of people in prison - there simply aren't enough prisons - but they can have hundreds of millions of people doing whatever they want them to do.
Comments
In my opinion, this is really the heart of the matter. It doesn't just give power to the executive branch. If you create and pass a law that potentially makes a significant percentage of the population into criminals, you have a bargaining chip of unprecedented power.
The greatest power that criminal prosecutors have is discretion - the power to charge or not charge any person with a crime. They can, and do on a daily basis, threaten charges that carry significant penalties and essentially force their target to enter into what they call a non-prosecution agreement. These are voluntary agreements, essentially saying that the government will not prosecute you if you follow the terms of the agreement. There are no rules for what the government can ask of the target in these agreements. They can quite literally require anything the government wants of the target - even things that a judge could not legally impose upon a guilty defendant to do as part of a criminal sentence.
They can't throw hundreds of millions of people in prison - there simply aren't enough prisons - but they can have hundreds of millions of people doing whatever they want them to do.