I do however think that Coakley is not only a horrible politician. Not only that, I think that based on her judgements in the cases you have mentioned and others, she is a horrible person. How are you going to charge someone with assault when the guy you assaulted was touching your child? If someone was touching my child I’d probably be in jail for murder, but as long as my child was safe I wouldn’t care. If someone abused her child, I wonder how she would feel about it.

But she’s made an unacceptable number of egregious and very serious mistakes in judgment in other cases.

Every legal decision she’s made, the one consistent factor that seems to guide them is, “which of the choices will do most harm to my current political opponent?” Literally nothing else seems to matter to her.

If you take a look at the history of the Fells Acre case, I think the original prosecutors can probably be forgiven. In the climate of the times, the widespread idea was that children always tell the truth and cannot be unduly influenced by the sort of leading questions the therapists used when interviewing them in the Fells Acres case. Now that we know the opposite to be true—that very young children are highly suggestible in such situations—almost all jurisdictions have put into place restrictions on such methods, and have trained special forensic units to be in charge of the children’s interrogations.

But by the time Coakley was blocking Gerald Amirault’s clemency, all of this was known. Her decision reflected a cold-blooded, small-minded, self-centered devotion to her own advancement at the expense of an innocent man. Let’s hope it backfires on her ambitions now.