Prosecutor ousted after alleged romance with illegal immigrant sex-crime suspect: 'Pattern of misconduct'

A prosecutor is supposed to be the person in the room least tempted to go easy on a defendant. Camille Johnston, according to Missouri's attorney general, ended up in an intimate relationship with a man she was supposed to be prosecuting for sexual assault, a man who was also in the country illegally. That's not a gray area. That's the exact scenario every ethics rule in a prosecutor's office exists to prevent, and it happened anyway.

What makes this worse than a garden-variety scandal is who the case involved. A sexual assault victim in that jurisdiction was relying on Johnston to build a case, not to be compromised by whatever was going on between her and the accused. When the AG's office describes a "pattern of misconduct," that phrase is doing a lot of work. This wasn't a one-time lapse in judgment. It suggests an office where the person with the most power over an immigration and sex-crime case decided her own interests came before the victim's.

We keep hearing that concerns about illegal immigration and crime are overblown, just talking points for people who don't understand the "nuance" of these cases. Then a story like this drops, and the nuance turns out to be a county prosecutor allegedly falling for the man she was charging. You don't need a policy paper to see why that undermines confidence in the system. Victims need to believe the person representing them isn't compromised, and taxpayers need to believe the office isn't being run for someone's personal benefit.

Johnston is out now, which is the right outcome, but removal after the fact isn't accountability, it's damage control. The real question is how this went unchecked long enough to become a "pattern" before anyone above her stepped in. Offices don't police themselves when the person in charge is the problem. That's why oversight from the state level matters, and in this case it clearly did its job.