How Prosecutorial Discretion Normally Works

From [HERE] A black man serving an 85-year prison sentence on a murder conviction deserves a new trial because of racial remarks that a longtime southern Illinois prosecutor made while summarizing the case for the all-white jury, the inmate's appellate attorney said Wednesday. Chicago attorney Steve Greenberg said the closing argument from Williamson County State's Attorney Charles Garnati during Marcus Marshall's 2011 trial in Marion injected racially charged language.

At one point, Garnati said he didn't want to generalize about blacks who make up roughly 4 percent of the overwhelmingly white, 18,000-resident city of Marion. "There are some very good law-abiding citizens in that community here," Garnati told the panel, as first reported Wednesday by the Chicago Tribune.

Garnati also made reference to "our white world," according to the trial transcript. Later, while describing how he believed blacks carried firearms, he said "in the black community, that is where they keep their handguns ... in their waistbands, ladies and gentlemen, with something covering it."