Last week, former President Donald Trump’s distant opponents for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, each pledged to pardon Trump for, apparently, anything and everything for which he can be pardoned, if they are elected. Vivek Ramaswamy, who often acts like an adolescent, made the same pledge six months ago. This is all well before jurors are picked, evidence is presented and tested, arguments are made to juries and before they render verdicts, including potential acquittals.

These are concerning pledges from those who seek the most powerful position in the free world and the executive responsible for the entire Department of Justice.

Just before the 2020 election I wrote, “we are entering a period of politicization of prosecution unparalleled in our lifetimes.” At the time, I was referring to the growing politically motivated, mob-assuaging prosecutions growing out of the post-George Floyd era, including Gov. Jared Polis’s and Attorney General Phil Weiser’s handling of the Elijah McClain case followed by the politically-charged Kyle Rittenhouse disaster in a Wisconsin courtroom. Only two years prior, Weiser – based on nothing more than public reporting – promised as a part of his campaign to prosecute opioid makers if elected.

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Since then, the politicization of our justice system has become more pervasive and more damaging, more quickly than I imagined.

We have witnessed New York AG Letitia James, Manhattan (New York) DA Alvin Bragg and Fulton County (Georgia) DA Fani Willis fulfill their campaign promises to go after Trump in local prosecutions (James’s is a civil case). Having targeted Trump by name to win votes, these three elected prosecutors have tainted the perception of their motives and the righteousness of their prosecutions – whether or not there are substantive, justice-based reasons to prosecute Trump.

The political corruption of our justice system is not a partisan issue.

Late last year, Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to promise that – if elected – he “will appoint a real special ‘prosecutor’ to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden, the entire Biden crime family….” Revenge prosecution is hateful to our sense of American justice and it must be called out and rejected at every turn. Once tolerated – and there are those who justify such misuse of prosecutorial discretion as some perverse notion of “rebalancing”- there can be no end to it.

The political assault on the integrity of our justice system is not limited to prosecution decisions.

The pressure of multimillions of non-Coloradans signing another Change.org petition, combined with an undenied call with Kim Kardashian, was enough to cause Polis to reduce the sentence for a truck driver who burned to death four innocent people (and burned up five others) to the practical equivalent of three years in prison. Yeah, I know – WTH?

Each of these recent individual examples are logs on a fire that seeks to burn our criminal justice system to the ground to be replaced by – the Lord of the Flies? The Gazette’s Vince Bzdek’s recent column on Lincoln’s prophetic 1938 Lyceum address warned of “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts.” We are becoming Lincoln’s nightmare.

We can begin to save America by denouncing those – regardless of political affiliation – who exercise prosecutorial discretion for any purpose other than justice. A good-faith basis to believe a specific person has committed a specific crime and a reasonable likelihood of success at trial are the bare minimum ethical requirements. There is zero room for revenge, tit for tat, rebalancing, political opportunism, assuaging a mob, winning over a Kardashian, or any other non-justice motive.

But denunciation is not enough. We must withhold our votes from those who seek public executive and prosecution powers and who abuse and corrupt our American justice system, whether their names be Polis, Weiser, Trump, DeSantis, Haley or any other.

George Brauchler is the former district attorney for the 18th Judicial District. He also is an Owens Early Criminal Justice Fellow at the Common Sense Institute. He hosts “The George Brauchler Show” on 710KNUS Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. Follow him on Twitter(X): @GeorgeBrauchler.