In the book Just Mercy, attorney Bryan Stevenson tells the true story of his long struggle to exonerate Walter McMillian, a man sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit.1 In one scene in the book, Stevenson meets with the newly elected district attorney for Monroe County, Alabama, where McMillian was convicted.2 In the hope of Convincing the prosecutor to accept a new trial of the case, Stevenson describes the (rather damning) evidence he has gathered to prove his client`s innocence. After some discussion, the prosecutor angrily replied, “My job is to defend this conviction.” 3 Interview – A meeting with the police or the prosecutor. Part V offers some general ideas for an institutional reform program in light of this role ethic. First, it examines how courts, legislatures, and state bars could exercise their power to determine the values that prosecutors pursue. Second, it takes into account the structural factors that define the institutional prosecutor`s office – size, available resources, degree of hierarchical control, how cases are conducted – and how these factors make value balancing more or less feasible in certain types of offices. Part V concludes by examining the various incentives that can drive prosecutors to overzealousness, including electoral politics, bureaucratic pressure to reach their own numbers, and an office culture that values victories and indicates the ways in which these incentives could be reduced or overcome. Sometimes prosecutors find evidence that can exonerate the person they want to convict. Since the prosecution is accused of presenting the truth, the prosecution is required to hand over all exculpatory evidence to the defence. This can be difficult. Imagine you`re a prosecutor in the middle of a stormy trial fighting for justice for a murder victim – a woman you believe was murdered by her husband. They are absolutely convinced that this man beat his wife to death.
In a police report, you will find notes taken during an interview with the 3-year-old child of the murder victim, who witnessed the murder. The child told police: “Dad was not at home when Mom was injured. A monster with a mustache hurt mom. Prosecutors are not factories that make gadgets, and their success should not be judged by the number of cases they charge or the convictions they receive, or the speed at which they receive them. Instead, prosecution decisions in the federal and state systems should be the product of a critical examination that determines whether a case merits indictment and whether the investigation was sound. Careful and objective scrutiny at every stage of the prosecution, from indictment to conviction to post-conviction review, must be an essential part of the culture. The job of a prosecutor is to deliver justice, not to get convictions. If prosecutors take the lead in getting it right, the rest of the system will follow. Preliminary Hearing – A hearing where the judge decides whether there is enough evidence to compel the defendant to go to court. Preliminary hearings do not require the same rules as court proceedings. For example, hearsay is often allowed during the preliminary hearing, but not during the trial. The purely adversarial prosecutor is already known from the previous discussion. Their role is best understood by analogy with the role of a conventional private lawyer.173 They are proponents who are assigned the opposite role of defense counsel, and they must act strategically within the limits of the law to ensure that the accused are convicted and punished.174 This partisan role implies the assumption of moral non-responsibility.
When an opposing lawyer does something that is conventionally immoral to achieve his or her goal, he or she is generally understood not only as acceptable, but also as correct.175 To know how the purely opposite prosecutor approaches his or her task, it will be helpful to distinguish three different types of issues that prosecutors face: evidentiary issues, trial issues and punishment issues. As criminal defense attorneys at Metro-Atlanta and Marietta, we represent you, the accused. It is the job of lawyer Lopes to ensure that your rights are respected. A defense lawyer must see the evidence and talk to witnesses. We can talk to the police, the prosecutor and anyone else interested in the case. Even if, like the client, you admit that you are guilty, what you tell us is privileged as a lawyer, and lawyers are generally not required to share this information, and we can always defend you. Another question about adversity in practice is what exactly prosecutors are trying to “win.” For a defense attorney with a human client, victory means getting what the client appreciates – spending less time in jail, getting immigration status, avoiding a conditional sentence, or whatever. But a prosecutor doesn`t have a human client, and so at some level, he has to define victory for himself. One possible measure of victory is convictions, and much of the law enforcement literature assumes that they are trying to maximize this.58 Another possible measure is the severity of the sentence.59 These two goals are in conflict – for example, one would expect a conviction-focused office to offer generous advocacy and a punishment-oriented office to be more stingy.60 Second, Reports from criminal courts suggest that prosecutors of low-level crimes seek to ensure control of defendants over time through mechanisms such as distraction and probation, rather than obtaining convictions or certain sentences.61 “Winning” for prosecutors necessarily means restricting the accused`s freedom in some way.
However, more specific definitions of victory may vary from prosecutor to prosecutor, office to office, and case to case.62 As a result, U.S. law enforcement has undergone an incomplete transition from the private partisan advocacy model to the justice-oriented government advocacy model. The same story, in general, applies to other countries that have inherited the English system. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and England have each experienced similar shifts from private to public prosecutor, each adopting a dualistic role ethic for prosecutors.89 However, the history of the United States is unique among these countries due to recent developments in our criminal justice system. In the decades between 1970 and today, the United States has become the criminal court of the world, and recent empirical evidence suggests that prosecutors have contributed to this change.90 U.S. prosecutors appear to have become more aggressive and focused on sentencing in recent decades, just as our professional ethics have been updated to emphasize the duties of prosecutors. to act neutrally and seek justice.91 Thus, partisan prosecutions have returned with all their might, but this time brought by prosecutors. And so the pendulum swings. Even the inequality of power of the prosecutor does not stop at the negotiated procedure. The study process is also unbalanced. Although defense lawyers examine prosecutors during the trial, there are significant limitations to their effectiveness. Public defense attorneys and court-appointed lawyers in the United States are not sufficiently funded and do not have the advantage of a police force to gather their evidence.121 While wealthy defendants like O.J.
Simpson can use their own wealth to effectively challenge their cases in court, the majority of defendants rely on state-paid lawyers.122 And the power of prosecutors does not even diminish then, if guilt has been established. There are also significant limitations on the ability of defendants to assert ineffective post-conviction support requests, which means that a prosecutor who exploits an ineffective defense lawyer is unlikely to have the conviction overturned.123 In the sentencing phase, there are a number of tools that allow prosecutors to unilaterally influence the accused`s sentence. As Departures for substantial support in the federal system.124 In statements of innocence after conviction The prosecutor often has decisive power over the outcome because he controls access to potentially exculpatory evidence.125 A prosecutor who takes a win-win approach to his or her work can therefore cause serious harm even in the trial and post-trial phases. The third approach advocated by legal experts is to divide the prosecution process into different phases, allowing prosecutors to act as adversaries only at certain stages, while assigning them a non-adversarial role in others.44 The distinction between these phases depends on respecting the premises of the opposite system. If there is effective advocacy on both sides and a neutral decision-maker to oversee the proceedings, prosecutors are free to behave like opposing lawyers. However, if there are no conflicting safeguards, either because the prosecutor has unilateral control (as in the case of prosecution decisions) or because there is no effective oversight by a neutral party (as in negotiations on settlement negotiations), the prosecutor should endeavour to safeguard the rights of the accused.