Another disturbing recent development in the saga of gonzo American prosecutors is New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman’s prosecution of the Evans Bank for violating consumer-protection regulations by not adequately making loans available in lower-income, largely minority, areas of Buffalo. These laws are sloppily written and are just pandering to specific income-level and ethnic voters, and enable opportunistic prosecutors to intensify their campaigns for higher office by pandering to targeted voting blocs and trying to superimpose affirmative action over commercial criteria on how banks treat their depositors’ and shareholders’ money. A competing bank chairman, not involved in any such case, Frank Hamlin of Canandaigua National Bank, wrote last month in a letter to his shareholders that he was “extremely suspicious of the arbitrary and capricious manner in which [prosecutors] are abusing the legal system in order to further their own political and economic interests.” Of the prosecution of Evans and another bank, he wrote that “the regulations are vague on explaining what conduct is actually prohibited. The media, of course, does the people no service by merely assuming these prosecutions are based in sound legal theory and fact … [unaware that the] legal system has mutated its focus from time-honored legal principle and justice to efficiency and political expediency.… The reason that 98 percent of prosecutions are settled and not taken to trial … has to do with a fundamental and reasonable lack of faith that our legal system is working properly.” It is a brave stand for a community banker to take opposite an attorney general who seeks votes by abusive grandstanding in the Spitzer-Cuomo tradition (that propelled both of them to the governor’s chair).… The United States is afflicted by a plague of unjust prosecutions, almost automatic convictions, and often one-way tickets to a bloated, corrupt, and frequently barbarous correctional system. This is not what the founders and guardians of the sweet land of liberty intended.