re: Why are the charges always dropped when an athlete gets arrested?

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I was a prosecutor in Kenai, AK for about a year and left quickly because I realized the Troopers were over-charging on a daily basis. Half my job as an Assistant District Attorney was to read stacks of police reports and I invariably dismissed almost 65% of them. The remaining we still took to trial and lost on the majority for lack of evidence. You need the evidence. Plain and simple. The job of the police isn't to evaluate evidence...they just interviewed, arrested and reported. We were then left with figuring out what was credible, what was admissable in court and could the witnesses and victims be counted on to provide realiable testimony in court (most cases were dropped because the victim wasn't a credible witness in court. I had a stalking case which was dropped because the woman had too many tatoos and didn't look "sympathetic" as the D.A. told me.)

It's incredibly hard to win Ra-pe cases. (Censored.) The alleged victim is the only one the jury is really listening to...and if she is bad on the stand...forget about it. Prosecutors across the nation don't bring cases to trial if they know they might lose...it's a resume builder...nobody hires someone for advancement unless they have a "clean" prosecution record. Prosecutors are afraid of losing the everyday non-public trial...imagine the publicity of a trial like this? They don't want to hang their mojo out there and ruin their career...just as with Kobe Bryant. If it isn't murder...it's just a judgment call for all prosecutors. They like their careers, they don't want them ruined by sports media and jury fanboys.

I don't know what happened with Ben, but his track record is something we jokingly referred to idiots who were never prosecuted but continually charged..."his lucky lucky modus operandi." If it smells like a rat and acts like a rat then it is a rat. That said, he could be a target. From what I've read and Ben's history and from what I saw first hand as a former prosecutor...it seems at the very least this was a form of "controlled professional athlete sex" where the victim wasn't physically forced in an obvious sense but was probably drunk, whisked away to a place she couldn't easily leave, had people blocking her exit and in essence the classic frat boy trap. That's what this probably is and it makes sense...Big Ben hasn't stopped acting like a frat boy since he joined the league.

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