Prosecutors are incentivized to get convictions, and that slanted thinking could easily be carried on to the bench.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/few-public-defenders-b...
>Prosecutors are incentivized to get convictions,
Their entire job is to get convictions. It literally doesn't matter if the prosecutor thinks someone should be convicted or not, that's for the judge to decide. The job of a prosecutor is to make as strong a case for conviction as he possibly can.
Likewise, the job of a lawyer representing a defendant is to make as strong a case for acquittal as he possibly can. Whether the lawyer thinks someone should be acquitted or not literally doesn't matter.
The other options are: jury trial, plea deal and dismissal.
Almost every case ends in a plea deal which is really just between the prosecutor and the defendant with the judge just putting a stamp on it.
It's unfortunate that you're probably right in the de facto sense. This is how many prosecutors view their role. But it's wrong. This is not the prosecutor's objective. Their obligation is to strive toward justice, not a conviction. If a prosecutor has a reason to believe the accused is not guilty, they have an obligation to act on that. To dismiss the charges, to share their belief with the defense, etc.
Here's someone explaining it[0] better than I can:
> 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
Another good quote [1]:
> For this reason, while a lawyer defending a man accused of a criminal offense should "exert all his ability, learning, and ingenuity, in such a defence, even if he should be perfectly assured in his own mind of the actual guilt of the prisoner," a lawyer should never prosecute "a man whom he knows or believes to be innocent."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor#United_States
[1] https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&h...
Ah yes, and it is politicians (you know, the people who oversee all of this) obligation to govern according to "the will of the people"...just like we see in movies, on TV, in the trustworthy and totally independent news, in various simulcast professionally written PR pieces after an incident occurs, etc. (Consensus across the board is how you know it's true. That, and: this is a democracy.)
Protect "democracy" with all you have, free and rational citizens, it is our most sacred institution.
1. Most prosecutors are liberals. It's not like right wing law students go looking for jobs in prosecutor's offices. I can't think of any from my class way back when.
2. The problem is more that judges and prosecutors are old colleagues. The slant is that they all know the defendants are guilty. There's so much crime, and aversion to losing trials, that (unless politics is involved) prosecutors tend to only bring cases where the defendant is clearly guilty. They like shooting fish in a barrel. If they find that there are problems with a case they tend to let the defendant get continuance after continuance until the case just goes away on its own.
The extreme radical position is that the justice system is fundamentally and irredeemably broken, and that there is no way that a conscientious leftist could work with, let alone within, a system that exists only to oppress the people and reinforce the power of the ruling elite.
There's obviously a lot of gray between those two positions, but the punchline is that its very possible to be a liberal DA. e.g. Chesa Boudin's stated goals exemplify what that's supposed to look like, although without unified support from the police and the judiciary, Chesa Boudin also exemplifies what would actually happen.
Experiences like that drive the broader leftist calls to defund or abolish the police. If you can't get buy in from the entire judicial system to reform itself, then just getting a leftist prosecutor elected/appointed will quickly lead to that prosecutor either being ejected from the position, or co-opted by the system they were trying to fix.
#2 it is totally true that prosecutors heavily rely on the judges being ex-colleagues of theirs. I have never heard of a prosecutor only bringing charges where the defendant is clearly guilty, though. That does not follow my experience, primarily in pre-trial detention, where I got to read the discovery materials in thousands of cases. Obviously they have a bar in felony cases of having to pass a grand jury, but it was once said you could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
How does that square with overcharging? Seems like a trend is to throw a bunch of charges at person in hopes they will cop a plea deal, which is considered a win. (cheating IMO).
Heuristic: Any law that too many people are charged with should be repealed. Either too much of the population doesn't think it should be illegal even past the point of purposely not respecting it, or it's excessively broad and too many people are violating it unintentionally.
This puts pressure on you to take a deal pleading to a reduced charge and all the other charges go away.
>prosecutors tend to only bring cases where the defendant is clearly guilty.
>They like shooting fish in a barrel.
Ease of conviction is tied to many factors that aren't guilt.
This isn't quite right. Prosecutors tend to only bring cases where they judge they can win (including pleas, etc.).
There is some correlation with guilt, sure, but it's not by any stretch the only thing going on.