[restalis]

Actually, the fairness of the trial should be a given, and the lawyers should be merely additional parties whose role is to assist the defendant's handicap of lacking the needed professional law knowledge. Lawyers are not something that one must employ in a dog fight against abusive prosecutors.

[Retric]

In the US Prosecutors are given impunity to do just about anything to get a conviction. The only recourse for a defendant is to get their conviction overturned but that does not give them the years of their life back while waiting for an appeal.

As to fairness it’s considered completely reasonable for an innocent person who is a possible flight risk to spend a year in jail awaiting trial.

[cplease]

Actually, prosecutors are governed by many rules from constitutional and statutory law as well as canons of ethics that apply to their special position. They have an obligation to promptly disclose any and all evidence they encounter favorable to the defendant. They have an obligation to drop charges at any point that it is apparent that there is no probable cause that the defendant is guilty of a crime, and not to prosecute when it is clear that the state cannot meet its burden of proof (in a criminal matter, beyond a reasonable doubt) by admissible evidence.

That being said, prosecutors are humans, and often-times egotistical, political, cynical, and more than occasionally vindictive humans with all that entails. So, it is hardly uncommon to see rules already stacked in the state's favor bent or broken.

Trials are virtually extinct in the USA. With few exceptions, if you find yourself going to trial, you are not in a good place. While good lawyers should be trial lawyers and unafraid of trying any triable case, the vast majority of the time if you are getting off, you are getting off pretrial with a dismissal or deferred prosecution agreement. If you lose on pretrial motions and the state is intent on prosecuting, then most of the time if your attorney can get you a deal and recommends that you take it, then it's a choice between pride/"truth" and rolling dice loaded against you and paying for it big time.

While in principle as a defendant you are not supposed to be punished for taking your right to go to trial, the plea system punishes you heavily, and if you refuse to "take responsibility" by admitting guilty (the earlier the better) and expressing remorse, then you get punished even more post-conviction, with a heavier sentence, and then certainly being denied parole if that is available in the state system.

[Retric]

In theory all of what you said is true, in practice a prosecutors 'absolute immunity' is a rather hard hurdle to overcome.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/01/30/7t...

PS: Absolute immunity protects from both criminal prosecution and lawsuits, so in general they can at worst be fired possibly disbarred. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_immunity

[cplease]

Absolute immunity is mostly a protection from civil lawsuits in personal capacity. When there is prosecutorial misconduct in a criminal case, defendants can get sanctions ranging to from dismissal with prejudice, mistrial, exclusion of evidence, to post-conviction relief depending on the severity of the misconduct. The biggest barriers are often either that the misconduct is hidden and difficult or impossible for the defendant (or really, his attorney) to discover, or that judges may decide that the misconduct was "harmless" and the defendant was not prejudiced, even in the face of blatant misconduct, when there is otherwise strong evidence.

As for the prosecutor themselves, defendants or judges can and do refer misconduct to bar associations which can and do disbar prosecutors. Judges can directly hold prosecutors in contempt and fine or jail them in extreme cases, or refer them for criminal prosecution on charges ranging from perjury, obstruction of justice, official misconduct, and criminal contempt and so on. As with any criminal cases involving criminal justice professionals, this is quite rare, but it does happen, and absolute immunity is no barrier to it.