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Comment by williamcotton | Hacker News Reader

Just for fun,

Moral and unethical: a prosecutor purposefully crafts a poor argument against someone he knows is innocent but has awful legal representation.

Immoral and ethical: a prosecutor purposefully crafts an amazing argument against someone he knows is innocent but has awful legal representation.

I'm sure these fall apart under only minor inspection!

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If the prosecutor knows the defendant is innocent, it is arguably unethical to prosecute him. The ABA Standards on the Prosecution Function 3-4.3(d): "A prosecutor’s office should not file or maintain charges if it believes the defendant is innocent, no matter what the state of the evidence."

Note that few if any jurisdictions have adopted this as binding. It's unlikely that a prosecutor would lose their license over what you propose. But it's nevertheless arguably unethical.

I'd change the second example from "knows is innocent" to "believes is innocent".

If the prosecutor "knows" they're innocent, then their argument against would be either untrue or purposefully withholding crucial information, which would make it an unethical argument.

I had the same examples in mind. Funny innit how prosecutors can't seem to reconcile morals and ethics.

Is this really specific to prosecutors? I feel like it would work in reverse with an incompetent prosecutor and a defense lawyer who knows his client is actually guilty. What stands out to me in those examples is that the difference is occurring because of a conflict between an explicit, codified set of rules (the code of ethics that lawyers operate under) and a perceived greater good that isn't being enforced or codified. To me, this makes it seem like the difference between ethics and morals is that ethics are codified and enforced in some sense (i.e. there's some authority with the ability to mete out punishments for violations), whereas morality covers right and wrong independent of consequences. I think in a moral context, the intent of an ethical code is to define the morality of various actions, but the question of whether something abides by those ethics is orthogonal to whether the action is moral or not; people might agree that a code of ethics says something but disagree whether what it says is moral or not.

Fair points.

In any case prosecutors have discretion, and they are where "tough on crime" runs head-on into basic humanity.

How is the second one ethical?

The prosecutor's job is not to determine guilt or innocence, but to argue to state's case to the best of their ability and let the judge decide.

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