It's not often that a candidate disqualifies himself for an office, but last week in C-Ville Weekly Robert Tracci said exactly the wrong thing for someone running for Albemarle County Commonwealth Attorney.

I was disappointed. I was all set to jump ship and support him, since my party's candidate, Denise Lunsford, was once a minor embarrassment. Tracci, in his interview last week, came off looking good.

Until the very last paragraph when he disqualified himself for the job in a big way.

That graf reads: " 'And justice is not about the outcome,' he says. 'It's a process, and a respect for the process.'"

That very thing--putting process ahead of justice--is the motive behind every prosecutor anywhere who enrages you by opposing the re-opening of a case despite new evidence showing wrongful conviction.

It's something we read about every few months. The National Innocence Project uses DNA to show the wrong person was convicted and is in jail, and the prosecutor fights tooth and nail to keep him there anyway. Why?

Respect for the process that won the conviction. And the prosecutor almost always tells us that's the reason. Process before justice.

We shouldn't want that, not anywhere and not here. If the current Albemarle prosecutor, Denise Lunsford, had put process ahead of justice, poor Mark Weiner would be on his way to prison for years, his life destroyed.

Instead Denise put justice before process and worked to free an innocent man. It doesn't look good to the public when prosecutors do that. It can make people think they're incompetent or evil, not courageous.

But courageous she was and to me that earns her another term as prosecutor.

I don't know Denise Lunsford's conviction rate but you can bet it's terrific. Our legal system is so tilted against the accused that the worst prosecutor in the nation has a conviction rate no lower than around 80%. Really.

Any experienced lawyer with competence can protect the public by getting perps off the street. But rare is the one with the guts to do the right thing and put justice ahead of process.

Weiner and the rest of us are lucky to have Lunsford. We should keep her.

Rey Barry (Electronic mail, July 22, 2015)