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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5716091" data-attributes="member: 54877">It isn't entirely arbitrary, though it can certainly be abused that way.  Take something I do know something about, prosecution for Medicaid fraud.  Several years ago I worked on reports for a state Medicaid outfit.  I saw the raw data for suspected and likely fraud most every day for seven years.   The DA charged with going after it goes after a tiny percentage of the total.  They simply don't have the resources to go after all of it.  So they go after the worst cases, and a handful of others that they think will be easy to prove, so as to make examples.  The rest of them the state will negotiate on terms of, basically--"pay us back the money and don't file Medicaid claims anymore, and will let you go."  Nonetheless, I know of at least one incident that was probably mere laxness that was prosecuted as fraud by a DA out to make a name, but should have been handled the softer way.  That doesn't mean that most Medicaid fraud prosecutions are arbitrary--just that there is always the possibility by the nature of the problem. If you randomly snatch a purse, you get one set of criteria.  If you randomly snatch a purse from an elderly lady in an area where two toughs nearly killing someone for $20 so that they can get their next drug hit is not uncommon, but is mostly inhabited by law-abiding people who grew up shooting squirrels out of trees in one shot--then you might get a slightly different set of criteria.  They aren't going to elect a DA that will prosecute that lady, and if he does in a moment of insanity, the jury isn't going to convict.   Doesn't matter what the law says. Or rather, it does, so the laws have changed lately to more reflect the reality of how it will be handled, rather than trying to change the reality to match the laws. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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