In two of this year’s most pungent  national crime stories — the Duke University rape scandal and the JonBenet Ramsey confession scandal — the next biggest stars, after the DNA, are the DAs. This question often comes up: Will the people vote the district attorney out of office as a result of his or her antics in the case?

To somebody who grew up in Washington, D.C., this perfectly normal question is perfectly foreign. We don’t get to elect a district attorney. We don’t even have a district attorney’s office, another of the many quaint differences between the U.S. and its capital city, where only second-class citizens live.

In July, D.C.’s nonvoting congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), introduced legislation that would create a D.C. district attorney’s office.

“No other citizens in the United States are treated so unfairly on this issue of such major importance. My bill would make the DA accountable to the people who elect him or her as elsewhere in the country,” Norton is quoted in a July 13 statement released by her office.

Norton’s District of Columbia District Attorney Establishment Act of 2006 is going nowhere in the Government Reform Committee. Norton’s office had the following comment on the bill’s bleak prospects:

“Unfortunately, there was no chance of getting the bill to the floor through the Republican Congress this year. In addition, this DA bill requires an affirmative decision from the mayor and the City Council that they are prepared to take on the additional $50 million annual cost. The third impediment would be opposition by the Justice Department and the administration.”

So the local U.S. attorney’s office, the largest such office in the country, will continue to be responsible for prosecuting both federal crimes and local crimes committed by adults in the District.

But wait! There’s a third horse in this race: The D.C. attorney general’s office. Mayor-elect Adrian Fenty and his nominee for attorney general, Linda Singer, have expressed interest in the attorney general’s office taking some of our federal prosecutors’ local criminal caseload.

All they’ve got so far, though, is an embarrassing bitch-slap from a federal judge: “How could there even be a thought that they could take that on? The D.C. attorney general’s office is not adequately or properly handling the cases it has now,” said U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, according to a Nov. 18 Washington Post story. Lamberth was miffed over the office’s apparent mishandling of a case against the D.C. police.

Former D.C. U.S. Attorney Roscoe Howard is also a bit skeptical of D.C.’s ability to take on the U.S. attorney office’s work: “I know everybody wants home rule … but I’m not sure that fiscally they’re ready for it. I don’t think they understand how expensive it is,” he says. “More power to ’em, I guess.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor, in his capacity as D.C.’s unelected district attorney, has the totally unique ability to try local thugs either in federal or local court. For our hometown criminals, this is a matter of life or death — even though you won’t find the “ultimate penalty” in the D.C. Code and voters rejected a congressionally imposed referendum on execution in 1992, federal prosecutors still can seek it against D.C. criminals if their offenses meet the right criteria.

A federal judge recently ruled that the murder and racketeering charges against Larry Gooch qualify him for a capital trial, set to begin in January. It’s a fat chance that a D.C. jury will send any man to die, but if it happens — well, score one for the Feds, I suppose.

Democracy, thy name is public-access television

Every Tuesday at 9 p.m., watch the wildest show on television: “Hear the Real Right Side” on DCTV, starring D.C.’s own James Caviness, a man who proclaims himself “the lone voice of common sense in the District of Columbia” and his show “the most politically incorrect commentary show in the universe.”

You’ll see a bespectacled Caviness standing at a podium, blasting the “despicable disgrace” of affirmative action and “phony liberals” like Eleanor Holmes Norton. Patriotic music is playing in the background, and Caviness is wearing an American-flag tie. It’s just the kind of stuff you would never, ever expect from a black 60-year-old cab driver who lives east of the river.

Caviness is joined by a cast of regular callers, who sometimes sound a little drunk and who often jibe him for his far-right views: “I saw you rakin’ leaves on the White House lawn!”

One man who called in on Nov. 28 just seemed baffled: “I ain’t never seen a man like white people like you do! I got 10 people in here and we listenin’ to this. I’m done!” he exclaimed and then hung up, just like he’d done during the previous show. Caviness was impervious to the ad-hominem, trudging ahead with his tirade against the phony liberal establishment.

How did this man get this way? The obvious answer, at first, is insanity. But Caviness explains his politics with an anecdote from his sophomore year of high school in Florida. He needed glasses so badly that he had moved to the front of the classroom just to be able to read the board. But his parents wouldn’t buy him a pair; they thought he only wanted them because he was going with a girl who wore glasses.

“I became convinced I had to do what I had to do to keep from going blind,” he says.

So he told his principal that he planned to take three weeks off to earn enough money picking oranges that he could buy spectacles for himself. Not wanting a student to miss so much school, his principal told his parents buy them for him. They did.

Afterwards, Caviness sat his parents down and asked them not to interrupt him (he had spent three or four days composing a little speech).

“I explained to them that what they had done was somewhat inexcusable,” he says, “but they had taught me the greatest lesson they could ever teach.”

He learned that he could not rely on anybody but himself to do things for him, and that became the basis for his small-government politics. “It was a very eye-opening experience,” he says.

He’s run for mayor several times. In the most recent election, he started running but decided he’d rather do his show than be a politician. But he still voted for himself.

Caviness has never been a real part of the D.C. Republican party, but he says he knows just how his political career would end if he were. It would be something like what happened in1997 to J.C. Watts, a black Republican ex-congressman from Oklahoma who triggered a round of GOP apologies after he decried “race-hustling poverty pimps” in an apparent jab at Jesse Jackson and Marion Barry.

Caviness says he would do the same thing, but when apology time came he would have a different strategy: “‘I don’t consider you a race poverty pimp,’” he would say. “‘You are a DAMN race poverty pimp!’ And then I would tell ’em all to go to hell.”