Putting As Many People as Possible in Jail is Not The True Mission of Prosecutors
In response to my article Many Innocent People Take Plea Deals To Avoid the Death Penalty, Constant reader KatieNorcross made this observation in the comment section:
I hate to tell you this but that stupid kid who drove his friends to the deli was guilty in the eyes of the law. He was an accessory to the crime. Even without a confession, a jury would convict him.
Katie is quite correct - any jury would indeed convict him. The fact is, if cops arrested a ham sandwich, the prosecutor could easily have it indicted - almost all grand juries do whatever a prosecutor wants (1). So there sits the jury seeing a man who was arrested, indicted, and brought to trial - they think he has to be guilty; after all, the cops think so, otherwise why would they have arrested him; the grand jury thinks so, otherwise why would they have indicted him; the prosecutor thinks so, otherwise why would he have prosecuted him?
No matter how often the judge may bleat about "being presumed innocent until declared guilty," most juries really start from the other end and look for the defense to prove itself innocent.
The trouble with most prosecutors is that they think their job is to put as many people in jail as possible. But they are wrong. In my article above I mentioned the case of a poor young man who was railroaded by an assistant prosecutor at the Essex County Prosecutor's Office who knew the young man was innocent. I found this odd. Do you know why? Because I found this Mission Statement on their website: "The mission of the Essex County Prosecutor's Office is to seek justice, to serve justice, and to do justice."
Sadly most prosecutors think a high conviction rate is a sign of a good prosecutor - it is not. A good prosecutor is one who reduces crime by dispensing justice. He diverts those who should not be in jail to drug court or to mental health treatment programs. Those who pose no violent harm to the community should have felonies reduced to misdemeanors or be released. Many first-time offenders who are sent to prison are more likely to commit new crimes after release. It makes sense - a man coming out of prison many times does not have the same family relationships, has lost his job, and now has a criminal record. Without ties to family and the community, without a job, with a record, what are the chances he'll again commit a crime?
To prevent these problems a good prosecutor will look closely at programs that are alternatives to incarceration.
Then we have the problem of innocents wrongly prosecuted and convicted. When a prosecutor offers criminals a reduced sentence in exchange for turning in someone else, just so he can raise his conviction rate, he is not seeking justice, serving justice or doing justice. Prosecutors know full well that most informants are handing him an Okey-dokey, an innocent stooge to take the fall. A good prosecutor should expend the same energy and resources making sure the innocent are not wrongly convicted as making sure the guilty are justly convicted.
Here is a relevant opinion of the Supreme Court [emphasis mine]:
Justia US Supreme Court Center, Berger v. United States - 295 U.S. 78 (1935)
The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the two-fold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor -- indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.
Please, to all prosecutors out there, read this carefully: the job of a prosecutor in a criminal prosecution is not to win the case, but to see justice done.
ENDNOTES
(1):
The Big Apple, “Indict a ham sandwich”
Solomon Wachtler (born April 29, 1930) is a New York State lawyer and former Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, which is the highest position in the State judiciary.
...
Wachtler famously observed that prosecutors have so much control over grand juries that they could convince them to "indict a ham sandwich." The phrase has become something of a cliché used in television legal dramas.
