As a criminal justice reform agenda, “defund the police” has generated a deserved backlash — not to mention a crime wave that may contribute to a wave of law-and-order Republican victories in the midterm elections.

A more productive approach might be to focus on the prosecutors, rather than the police. 

It’s not a policy reform area you hear much about. But it’s something that the most powerful Republican in America, Donald Trump, the former president, might ponder as a potential campaign issue, particularly as he himself faces politically motivated prosecutors. Once you start noticing examples of prosecutorial overreach, they appear as frequently as police misconduct. Both problems illustrate the risks that excessive government power can pose to human liberty.

A slew of recent cases tell the story.

The former CEO of blood-testing startup Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, was convicted by a federal jury of four counts. She had been charged with 11 counts. Many headlines emphasized that she had been found guilty of something, but hardly anyone asked why she’d faced seven charges that a jury couldn’t agree to find her guilty of. We’ve gotten so used to the prosecutorial practice of “overcharging” — throwing everything at the defendant, in the hope that something will stick — that the narrative was “Holmes guilty,” rather than, “Prosecutors fail to win conviction on more than half of the counts.”

Likewise, Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty by a federal jury in Manhattan of five of six counts, though there are now questions about whether some of the jurors were forthright about their abuse histories during the selection phase. There’s an asymmetry: If Maxwell is convicted of even a single count, she’s branded a criminal, but when the prosecutors fail to win a conviction on one of the counts, as happened here, there’s no real cost to the government lawyers.

Faced with this threat of being charged with multiple crimes, more and more people caught in the criminal justice system choose plea deals rather than exercising their Sixth Amendment right to a speedy and public trial. Two such recent cases involve education reformers. 

In Puerto Rico, Julia Keleher accepted a plea agreement last year, despite what a recent article described as “no legitimate claim that Keleher took or personally benefited from public money.”

In New York in January 2022, a charter school founder, Seth Andrew, pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud. A press release from federal prosecutors about the case was headlined, “Former White House Adviser Pleads Guilty to Devising a Scheme to Steal $218,000 From Charter Schools He Founded.” This is another prosecutorial trick: the thought crime, by which merely “devising a scheme” becomes a potential federal crime. It’s another way that prosecutors can overcharge; there’s the underlying charge, and then a conspiracy charge on top of it.

In a different case that involved no criminal charges, Michael Steinhardt reached an agreement with the then-district attorney of New York County, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., by which Mr. Steinhardt surrendered artworks that he had purchased. Mr. Vance’s successor as district attorney, Alvin Bragg, on January 18 announced that five antiquities from Mr. Steinhardt had been “returned” to Iraq. Said Mr. Bragg, “These illegally trafficked relics shouldn’t be kept in the mansion of a billionaire, thousands of miles away from their homeland. They should be on display in a museum or university in their country of origin.” Contrast that with a New York Times dispatch from Rome about digitization plans for a Vatican library, reporting that many of the books “come from countries like Syria, Lebanon or Iraq, where war or other turmoil put entire collections at risk. Others come from countries where authoritarian censorship was equally threatening.” 

So the Vatican gets credit for keeping books away from Iraq, while in Manhattan a prosecutor forces Mr. Steinhardt to send material there? In so many of these cases the issue isn’t really the activity, but the identity of the actor.

Raj Rajaratnam, like Mr. Steinhardt, was a successful money manager. In his 2021 book “Uneven Justice: The Plot to Sink Galleon,” Rajaratnam recounts how the top federal prosecutor at the time, Preet Bharara, subjected him, before a trial, to a public “perp walk” designed to humiliate and punish.

The former speaker of the New York State Assembly, Sheldon Silver, recently died in federal custody. Silver’s prison sentence for the notoriously vague crime of “honest services fraud” amounted, in retrospect, to a death penalty.

The prosecutors leave government positions for law firm jobs, cashing in by offering expensive advice on how best to deal with their former colleagues. The government lawyers, meanwhile, are already claiming that because increasing numbers of prosecutors are black, pushing back against prosecutorial misconduct or overreach somehow amounts to “racist rhetoric.” That cry of racism is a diversion from the cause of criminal justice reform. 

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Mr. Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of “Samuel Adams: A Life.”