I skipped out on my Civ Pro tutoring session yesterday to check out Carl Brizzi, who is the Marion County Prosecutor here in Marion County. I don't know what I was expecting to hear from him, but I have to admit that I was impressed. He wasn't at all like I had expected him to be. He seemed to be speaking kind of off the cuff, and was very informal and entertaining. He seems to have a passion for his job, and the focus of that jobs seems to be a nice balance between helping victims and putting the "bad guys" in jail.

I didn't realize this until some yokel made the obligatory "criminals don't have any constitutional rights as far as I'm concerned" comment when Brizzi talked about the difficulties in balancing those rights with the rights of law abiding citizens. Such an ignorant comment, and if our Prosecutor agrees with those comments, he certainly didn't show it.

What really impressed me, though, was when someone asked a question about whether crack dealers and meth dealers receive the same sentences he took the question head on and acknowledged the race issue behind it. A lot of people would have either been offended by the question, or defensive, and he was neither. (and they do get the same sentences, by the way.) I was just really glad that I had put aside my initial ideas about him to go and see what he was all about. You only get one chance to make a first impression, right? It was a good first impression.