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Comment by tiahura | Hacker News Reader

Being primarily a civil attorney, I'm well aware of the disproportionate number of former prosecutors on the bench. A couple of points:

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.

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Being primarily a criminal, #1 doesn't follow my experiences. I've been very friendly with a large number of prosecutors in my time, and I can't imagine a single one of them being a liberal.

#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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich#Cultural_impact

> prosecutors tend to only bring cases where the defendant is clearly guilty.

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.

>prosecutors tend to only bring cases where the defendant is clearly guilty.

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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overcharging_(law)

That's how you know they're guilty -- by tacking on some charges that everyone is guilty of. Of course, you don't charge everyone with them, only the people who are being charged with something else. That way prosecutors can maintain a high conviction rate.

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.

They charge you with the crime you did, and a bunch of bs charges as well.

This puts pressure on you to take a deal pleading to a reduced charge and all the other charges go away.

Thanks for that insight. My discomfort is with the notion that they could know that the defendant is guilty- sure there may be some obvious cases, but I do not trust most humans to differentiate their intuition from hard evidence.

And unfortunately, judges are the only legal entity empowered to use their intuition for legal decision making. Sentencing is a good example; judges can kinda just decide sentences based on feel. Just throw some number out there.

That's not unfortunate, it's the system working as intended. Not being funny but that's why we call them judges. You can't have everything decided in advance by an algorithm baked into the system, part of the system is devolved deciding, sometimes called "equity".

     >prosecutors tend to only bring cases where the defendant is clearly guilty.

     >They like shooting fish in a barrel.

Desire to Convict is tied to many factors that aren't Ease of Conviction.

Ease of conviction is tied to many factors that aren't guilt.

I think your point on #2 makes quite a lot of sense, but #1 rings hollow. Plenty of erstwhile liberals hoist the black flag when there's inconvenience in their own neighborhoods; no reason to think it isn't similarly situational with regards to people who are incentivized towards securing conviction.

To pile on, part of the conflict between liberals and those further left is that "law and order liberal" is a thing. That is, while liberals might concede that the justice system is flawed, there's still an underlying faith that the system will get it right the overwhelming majority of the time.

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.

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