From the New York Times:

J'accuse!
Gone Is the Swaggering Prince of Prosecution

By MICHAEL POWELL
Published: April 1, 2007
THE e-mail is pleading, imploring and often so very careful. In messages sent to their bosses at the Justice Department, federal prosecutors react to their firing.

One federal prosecutor, Margaret M. Chiara of Michigan, notes that her office's firearms prosecutions are up, and that her firing "makes me so sad." Another prosecutor, David Iglesias of New Mexico, asks a senior Justice Department official for a telephone conversation to set a day of departure, promising that "my call will be pleasant and respectful."

Another fired prosecutor, Paul Charlton of Arizona, sends an urgent e-mail message to the Justice Department, asking that its spokespeople help explain to the news media why he was being fired, instead of his speaking to reporters himself.

It cannot be pleasant to try to salvage your reputation and career, particularly for the eight prosecutors cashiered despite having compiled — by many accounts — fine records. But in reading the prosecutors' e-mail messages released by the Justice Department, the chastened words could be disorienting to those accustomed to some federal prosecutors of the past, swaggering princes who often boasted of their independence from Washington.

"Big" Jim Thompson, the Chicago federal prosecutor, claimed many political scalps in the 1970s, not least that of former Gov. Otto Kerner Jr.

Herbert J. Stern, United States attorney in New Jersey in the early 1970s, edged awfully close to indicting a plurality of the public officials in his state in four years. (The count? Eight mayors, two secretaries of state, two state treasurers, two political bosses, a congressman and 64 public officials.)

In Manhattan, Rudolph W. Giuliani chased down financiers and crushed mafia families. And Robert M. Morgenthau, one of his predecessors in the Southern District, shrugged off a threatening phone call from a Democratic powerbroker and got indictments of top aides to the Democratic House Speaker John W. McCormack in the 1960's.

"The joke is that it was the Sovereign District of New York," said Richard Ben-Veniste, a former deputy to Mr. Morgenthau. "No one was asked about their political affiliation and essentially the Justice Department was excluded from many conversations."

This is not so simple as a lament for giants who strode the earth. It is also true that a giant can stomp carelessly on those who do not deserve prosecution. And the new generation has a star or two. United States Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald has drawn many eyes to Chicago, where he has won indictments of dozens of defendants in public-corruption cases. Most recently, he did a turn on the stage in Washington, successfully prosecuting I. Lewis Libby Jr., a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Yet the geography of prosecutorial power has shifted in the past two decades. Prosecutors struggle more and more with straitened budgets and rules, and a Justice Department that holds a far tighter leash.

"Power is much more centralized in the Department of Justice than it ever had been," said Professor Bruce Green, a former assistant federal prosecutor in New York and director of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics at Fordham University School of Law. "Nowadays, the Justice Department knows much more about which cases you're bringing and the sentences you're handing out."

"In the past we felt more empowered to ignore them," he said.

Three changes help explain that shift. Sentencing reform in the mid-1980s circumscribed the discretionary power of prosecutors and judges. At the same time, the Internet has aided the collection and centralization of information, greatly expanding the Justice Department's ability to track a wide variety of cases on the local level.

Finally, there is the regimen imposed by the Justice Department, which places a high premium on loyalty. President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, required that his prosecutors seek the toughest sentences, particularly in terrorism and death penalty cases. All of this chews at the core of a prosecutor's power, which is about the exercise of choice.

"There never used to be an imperative to bring the harshest charges or a particular sentence, and that meant a prosecutor could craft his own philosophy," Mr. Green said. "Now you are instructed to bring the harshest charges, and seek the harshest sentence and that imposes a superficial consistency while demeaning a prosecutor's real power."

That said, some of the cocksure prosecutors of the past have been accused of harboring an unhealthy love for stagecraft. So Mr. Giuliani in 1986 donned a Hells Angels vest and sunglasses and traveled with the similarly disguised Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato to Washington Heights to buy crack.

Mr. Giuliani also paraded a Wall Street trader out of the office of Kidder, Peabody in handcuffs. The charges against him were later dropped and Mr. Giuliani later conceded that the public spectacle was wrong.

"You don't want a U.S. Attorney to decide cases within his very broad discretion because of his anticipated future political career," said Stephen J. Gillers, a professor at the New York University School of Law.

Then, too, perhaps everyone is too quick to proclaim that an era has passed. Prosecutorial reputations, like gardens, take careful tending. Carol Lam, the federal prosecutor in San Diego, won a conviction of Republican Representative Randy (Duke) Cunningham, and was investigating another California Republican, Representative Jerry Lewis, when she was fired. Even Mr. Fitzgerald flirted with political death, as a Bush administration official briefly suggested sacking him.

"Fitzgerald is every bit as good as the giants of the past and Lam is potentially great, too," said Russell Pearce, a professor of legal ethics at Fordham Law School. "You need a chunk of time to create a body of work and the reputation that comes with it."