Fired for hating cowardice

Dawn Eden's column in Daily News is called BlogOn, and she wrote about assistant prosecutor Lance Salyers who got fired because of something he wrote on his blog.

Last Monday, he said, he got a police report in preparation to review a prior decision to not press charges against an alleged rapist. In investigating the refusal, he said, he called the prosecutor who had turned down the case. She said there was "not enough evidence to convict," Salyers wrote to me in an E-mail. "Later that night at home, I couldn't sleep because I was so incensed at how and why this particular case had been twice refused for charges," he explained. "As an exercise in personal therapy, I wrote my post 'I Hate Cowardice.' " The entry on Salyers' blog Ragged Edges didn't give names or details. But it left no question that he was incensed. He raged against the "Powers That Be [that] tell its Victim in no uncertain terms, 'You're not worth fighting for.' " Salyers told me that the day his "I Hate Cowardice" entry appeared, his panel voted to take on the twice-refused case - and the case's original prosecutor was infuriated. As he tells it, she dropped a printout of his blog entry in his lap, saying, "So you think I'm a coward now? You've got a lot of ----s!" The next day, the first assistant prosecutor and the chief of the criminal division called in Salyers, who is married with a 5-month-old daughter, and fired him, he said. "I was told in no uncertain terms that if I had not written what I wrote [on my blog] 'We wouldn't even be having this conversation,' " he argued.

Additional information is here and here.

Michael Bates blogged Dayton's loss could be Tulsa's gain. Lance has connections to Oklahoma -- he went to Oklahoma Baptist University and married a Tulsa girl, a graduate of Memorial High School. He and his wife had been thinking they'd like to move back so their baby girl could grow up near her grandparents. I think Tulsa County residents would be blessed to have Lance working for them to put the bad guys behind bars, and I think he'd fit in well with District Attorney Tim Harris's team. In fact, he reminds me a lot of Tim -- a devout Christian and someone willing to take risks to do the right thing.

I hope that Lance gets a much better position, either here in Tulsa, or whereever he chooses to practice.