2025 was a bad year for criminal justice.
Executions in the U.S. surged, nearly doubling the 2024 numbers, and reaching 47 by year-end, largely driven by a record 19 executions in Florida, the highest in over 15 years.
2025 also saw an aggressive shift linking immigration enforcement with criminal punishment, notable in several states, including Florida, Alabama, and Texas. And it saw the most radical remake of the federal Department of Justice ever, which for its entire history operated under an ethos of fair, impartial, and nonpartisan prosecution, suffering its only miscarriage in the Watergate scandal, which exposed the department’s shortcomings in supervising the ethics of its leadership.
The lesson from Watergate was that the department needed to ensure that personal and partisan interests must not influence legal judgments; that the work of the department would inspire public confidence that politics and pressure would not be permitted to influence its policies and decisions; and that a culture needed to be established in which officials were committed to sound judgments, professionalism of the highest order, and integrity.
In line with this mission, and to protect the transparency, ethical integrity, and accountability in the department, offices, rules, and regulations were established. Offices of professional responsibility and an inspector general in the department were created; principles of fair and ethical prosecution were articulated; Congress enacted an Ethics in Government Act as well as a Civil Service Reform Act to ensure an ethical and nonpartisan work force.
These reforms guided the work of the department for the next fifty years, under Republican and Democratic administrations. There was some slippage, and the department faced criticism for some of its decisions. But the guardrails established after Watergate held up reasonably well, especially its investigations of Russia’s influence in the 2016 presidential election, and the indictments of Donald Trump for attempting to undermine the 2016 election and stealing sensitive government documents after leaving office.
But after pledging during his 2020 presidential campaign to get retribution against his political enemies, one of Trump’s first executive actions was to appoint as attorney general a MAGA loyalist, Pam Bondi, who was in sync with Trump’s directives to weaponize the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute his political enemies. In short order, the guardrails that were established 50 years earlier to ensure the Justice Department’s neutrality and independence were destroyed. The offices of professional responsibility and inspector general were gutted; department attorneys and FBI agents suspected of disloyalty were fired; political judgments determined department policy; Trump loyalists were appointed U.S. Attorneys without Congress’s constitutionally required consent; and individuals on Trump’s enemies list were investigated and indicted. The Justice Department supported Trump’s tyranny.
Further demonstrating his contempt for law and justice, Trump used his pardon power to free from conviction or punishment not only the January 6th insurrections but a rogue’s gallery of Trump’s most villainess cronies, fraudsters, and grifters — and often in return for gobs of money.
But there was some resistance. Millions of people demonstrated against Trump’s claim to kingship. The Democratic Party woke up. And notwithstanding a subservient and spineless United States Supreme Court, as federal cases entered the judicial pipeline an increasing number of federal judges vilified the conduct of an increasing number of department lawyers, berating them with harsh language rarely seen before, and announcing that presumptions of regularity and good faith traditionally bestowed on federal prosecutors would no longer be given.
As this is being written, and 2026 is beginning, events will continue to occur, almost daily, that may render my discussion of 2025 innocuous, superfluous, inaccurate, mundane, or seriously understated. Whether that portends a return to a time when federal prosecutors conduct themselves responsibly and ethically in the pursuit of neutral justice is not clear.
But in my opinion the emerging signs look hopeful.
Happy New Year!
Bennett L. Gershman is a distinguished professor at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University
