Monkey See, Monkey Do?

As chief deputy assistant in the Las Vegas district attorney’s office, 47 year old David Charles Schubert has prosecuted drug cases against some big names, Paris Hilton and Bruno Mars among them.  The irony (schadenfreude?) is thus undeniable.

From the ABAJournal (which comes from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, but since they don’t want anyone quoting from their stories, they get no link love);


The Las Vegas chief deputy district attorney who prosecuted Paris Hilton for cocaine possession has been arrested and accused of buying crack from a man riding in his BMW.


David Schubert was arrested Saturday evening after an officer saw what he thought was a drug transaction and stopped Schubert’s vehicle, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. The prosecutor was charged with possession of cocaine.


There are some intriguing holes to be filled in this story, such as what the officer saw occurring in Schubert’s BMW that made him think a drug deal was taking place as opposed to, say, the exchange of money over sports betting or prostitution, neither of which are frowned upon as severely in Vegas.  One would anticipate, and properly so, a motion to suppress for a violation of Schubert’s constitutional rights in the search and seizure.  That would be when they found the crack.

Crack?  That must be the ghetto drug cooked up for the purported enhanced powers of addiction and affect, to be distinguished between powder cocaine used by wealthy white people and rarely subject to scrutiny by police since it’s used in private parties and Studio 54.  That’s the sort of stuff enjoyed by celebrities, like, oh, Paris Hilton and Bruno Mars (whose real name is Peter Hernandez and apparently sings for a living).

To call a story like this bizarre is to demonstrate a mastery of the obvious.  Maybe this is what happens when you spend too much time around celebrities, and start to adopt their ways.  It’s unclear that there is any broad lesson to be found in this situation, except that we are all subject to human frailty, even high-powered prosecutors in charge of high-profile cases.

I can’t help but wonder what Oscar Goodman, Las Vegas Mayor and former criminal defense lawyer, is thinking about now.  David Roger, the Vegas District Attorney, says that Schubert’s future with his office is “bleak.”  But then, why would Schubert have any interest in returning to prosecution, when he can now forge ahead with his future as a celebrity.  After all, he’s got a similar skillset as Paris Hilton (absent the whole heiress thing).

Seriously, the stop and search sounds like a significant issue, and if Schubert’s constitutional rights were violated, then the crack should be suppressed and the case dismissed.  But I can’t shake off the wonderment.  I just can’t.  My bad.

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5 thoughts on “Monkey See, Monkey Do?”

  3. EarlW

    Maybe it was a move to get a teaching job… Just like Elliot Spitzer.
    I don’t have a problem with prostitution or drug use. It’s the sheer hypocrisy of doing something that you normally put people in jail for.
    Perhaps we need the reverse of double jeopardy. If you are a responsible for making or upholding the law and you break that law, the penalty should be doubled.

  4. Pete

    I don’t want to see this guy jailed, and it has nothing to do with the suspicious-as-all-hell reason for the stop. I bet THAT report would have made for a great game of boilerplate-bingo. “Next up – I have ‘furtive movement’, does anyone hav” and like sixty-three people all cry out “BINGO!”

    No, no jail time for this guy, or anyone making the (considered, ill-considered, informed, ill-informed) decision to purchase and consume someone’s bathtub drugs. (I.E., reference to bathtub cheese, concept of which I find disgusting but some people love it, and who am I to say no?)

    But I do think something needs to happen if it’s actually proven that, yes, he was engaging in the illicit purchase of illicit substances, the act that he normally prosecutes viciously and with prejudice.

    So disbarment? I mean, there has to be some sort of serious ethical violation to have been directly responsible for an aggregate centuries of jailtime for innumerable citizens, along with countless property seizures and fines, and then get caught doing the very thing you so readily punished the proles for.

    And if not, the various Bar Associations are every bit as corrupt and/or impotent and/or afraid of really doing their job as I suspect them to be.

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