[wwweston]

Well, there's your problem: you're assuming prosecutors are people. ;)

That's a simplistic (if fun) jab, of course, but it's probably not an exaggeration to say that the system we have gives incentives for prosecutors to act rather inhumanely -- and tends to attract personalities who are driven by their own ambition or a faith in their own judgments when it comes to justice. There's a sense in which the prosecutor role we've created really isn't "people" in the same way businesses aren't "people."

[sharkweek]

I have a close friend who is a county prosecutor who after over a decade on the job has changed immensely as a person. I don't blame him, as his intentions for taking the job were incredibly pure (real talk, he could have easily taken a private sector job for 3x the pay) but some of the shit, and I do mean shit, he has to put up with seems absolutely unbearable.

He had to work child abuse cases for a little over 3 years, and to occasionally see some of the scummiest people on earth walk free for some of the most ridiculous things (technicalities, mishandled evidence, a rogue juror causing a mistrial putting the defendant back in contact with the kids, etc) will break the strongest of humans.

Fortunately he got moved to misdemeanors per his request a few years back, seems to be doing a lot better. Not trying to say all prosecutors are great people, but it's a ridiculously tough job.

[fineman]

If only prosecutors would be jailed for double the term of anyone we could prove they were unreasonable persecuting.

But unfortunately, they have literally zero consequences.

[l33tbro]

I get the jokiness of your quip, but you're really quite out of your depth here.

Can you please back up your bold statement that the system attracts personalities driven by their own ambition with some data or evidence?

I'm intimate with a number of prosecutors (including my partner), and I've not once come across a prosecutor who possesses such attributes of character. It's quite the opposite actually - most turn away higher paying law firm jobs to do what they believe is community service.

To me this injustice has occured on behalf of corrections facilities management. Very sad.

[jacquesm]

Does the term 'conviction rate' ever get used?

[jeffcoat]

I think I know what you're getting at, but the problem here is that prosecutors have some discretion.

The chain of thought that goes

  I only prosecute worthy cases

  => I picked those cases because these people are guilty,
      and need to be convicted for the good of society 

  => my conviction rate is exactly the same as my 
     'I made a better world' rate.

must be very tempting. Wrong, but tempting.

[Tomte]

It's a "damned if i do damned if i don't" situation.

If the conviction rate is low, people on the Internet say that the prosecutor is just harassing innocent people.

If the conviction rate is high, people on the Internet say that the judges rubber-stamp whatever the prosecutor throws at them.

I've never seen anyone say "sounds about right" when any conviction rate was posted.

[Edit: Killed the last sentence, as per site guidelines]

[jacquesm]

Exactly. So how about 'if you are concentrating on the conviction rate then you're doing it wrong'?

It's like the story about communist strategies for optimizing production, making a metric by which you measure performance in some hard to quantify domain is going to give you an industry optimizing for that metric which will have a ton of un-intended consequences.

The goal of a prosecutor should not be to aim for a certain conviction rate (either high, low or anything inbetween) and the goal of a justice system should not be related to any such metrics either.

The right way to go about this would be to establish guilt or innocence without regards to any metrics and with a relative disregard for the cost of such an operation because the number of criminals is low compared to the number of non-criminals and should err on the side of caution.

[l33tbro]

In what context do you mean?

[jacquesm]

In the context of your communications with the prosecutors you are familiar with.

[l33tbro]

No. I think that gets thrown around more at the legislator level - it's certainly not a KPI or anything.

[jacquesm]

Interesting, wikipedia has an entry on conviction rate and it specifically mentions 'prosecutor':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate

[coldtea]

>Can you please back up your bold statement that the system attracts personalities driven by their own ambition with some data or evidence?

You mean besides obvious empirical observation of the system's history in the past 50 years or so?