After posting my question about why a case involving a cop and sexual assault was heard in federal court, some of you have emailed me with some good points.  (Hat tip to Rob Blackstock and Herman Mayfarth.)  They made the point that had the cop been convicted under state sexual assault laws, he would have served harder and longer time in a prison with violent offenders where he, as a former cop, would have been targeted.

Furthermore, had he been convicted of sexual assault, he would have been forced to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, and California laws on sex offenses are especially draconian.  Instead, he is convicted of a “civil rights violation” and almost surely will be incarcerated in a minimum-security federal prison.  (Now, the prison camps are not “country clubs,” no matter what journalists might tell you.  However, they are much better than the hellish maximum-security prisons in the California system.)

Thus, it seems that the feds actually were intervening to give this cop special treatment.  That is a plausible explanation and it makes sense to me that government agents once again were protecting their own.