Imagine

Imagine if dodgy local public officials were afraid to peculate for fear of prosecution?
Imagine if crooked businessmen were prosecuted for consumer fraud?
Imagine if concerned citizens were always treated with dignity, respect and consideration when they contact prosecutors about government wrongdoing?
Imagine if polluters feared prosecution?
We could have a State's Attorney's office that fulfilled the functions Florida's Constitution had in mind.
I was privileged, during the 1980s, to cover as a young newspaper editor the office of James Nelson Ramsey, the District Attorney General for Anderson County, Tennessee (in Tennessee, since 1796, local DA's have generally been called "General").
General Ramsey refused to cower to power, earning dozens of disciplinary complaints -- my favorite complaint was from Sheriff Dennis O. Trotter,who complained that General Ramsey called him a "crooked SOB" to Johnny Ray Morgan, who was Sheriff Trotter's bagman, a pistol-packing ruffian with a fourth grade education who threatened my publisher and who would show up at our office after someone embellished and told him about one of my news stories.
Our Appalachian Observer newspaer receptionist, Vicki, who was formerly with FDLE, would calmly and sweetly say, "he's across the street, in the Courthouse, Mr. Morgan," knowing full well I was just up the hall, behind a hollow core door.
Sheriff Dennis O. Trotter and Bagman Johnny Ray Morgan both went to federal prison for their crimes.  Bagman Morgan was so violent that the federal judge kept him in prison until his guilty plea, based on surveillance tapes where he spoke of his threats and violent crimes.  Morgan was so bold that he was heard by one of our reporters entering the Sheriff's office proclaiming, "Bagman's here. Here come the bagman."
General Ramsey revealed horrific jail conditions, working to improve them.
General Ramsey questioned police corruption and brutality and routine beatings of suspects.
General Ramsey believed racism was an institutional force in Oak Ridge and Anderson County, and sought to undo it -- he had picketed the segregated Oak Ridge movie theatre as a boy, in the company of scientist Waldo Cohn.  As an adult, he made it his business to know which police officers were KKK members, and to be on guard for racist prosecutions and racist police techniques (e.g., Oak Ridge had only one surveillance camera, located in the African-American community).
General Ramsey ended law enforcement crookedness, flummery and dupery, such as the scheme by which bad check charges were never filed, with successive Anderson County Sheriffs and their henchmen pocketing the filing fees and court costs by the bad check writers.
Gerneral Ramsey prosecuted payroll-padding, embezzlement and no-show jobs.
General Ramsey prosecuted an Oak Ridge Police Captain and former UT All-American Basketball player for arson and insurance fraud involving Oak Ridge Motors.
A card-carrying ACLU member, a Democrat (and both a Unitarian and Church of Christ member), General Ramsey was an atypical DA.
He allowed defense attorneys to present exculpatory evidence to the Grand Jury.
He plea-bargained in my presence -- he had nothing to hide and the defense lawyers were okay with it.  How many reporters have ever been able to observe the secret process of plea-bargaining?   (A bemused and amusing General Ramsey did eventually have the Courthouse staff construct a half-door with Christmas bells, dubbing it "the Slavin barrier," so that he would know when I was approaching his inner sanctum.
General Ramsey helped empower honest lawmen to do their jobs without fear or favor -- he took risks.
General Ramsey identified with the people, not the powerful -- he was not the DA for the 1%.  He was elected with significant union support (after the school superintendent busted the school bus driver union by contracting out busses to his cronies).
He helped empower activists and journalists.  We ran off a crooked school superintendent, helped imprison a crooked sheriff and exposed nuclear weapons plant pollution, including the world's largest mercury pollution event at the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Plant. 
General Ramsey joined with what he called "The Gang of Four" -- two County Attorneys and two District Attorneys for Anderson and Roane Counties -- to plan on bringing a sworn, verified public nuisance action against Union Carbide and the Department of Energy's Y-12 nuclear weapons plant over pollution.  (They dropped the idea when the State Attorney General filed an historic federal court action).
General Ramsey did not win all his cases. He wasn't perfect.  He wasn't a knight in shining armor.  Like a lot of lawyers and intellectuals, he could be lazy, overbearing and egotistical. But he was heroic, and fun to watch.
He taught activists the value of courage.  He was my first law professor, de facto, if not de jure -- he told me about legendary corruption and how to fight it.
General Ramsey's papers are at Dartmouth University.  Some day, someone will write a book on him.  Flawed though he was, he was heroic in a very dangerous place -- Appalachia, in a place where hundreds of workers have died in coal and nuclear weapons industries.
Our times call for heroes, and not zeroes.
Imagine what it would be like to have a State's Attorney here more like General Ramsey and less like Boss Hogg.
What do you reckon?