Overheard
A prosecutor turned to one of the public defenders I work with during a brief court recess and said to him, "I'm glad I don't have your job. Your clients sometimes go to jail even when they haven't done anything wrong."
posted by P.D. Clerk at 2:45 PM
7 Comments:
I'm truly speechless.
I hope the P.D. wasn't. But then, how do you come up with a snappy come-back to that?
How do people like that sleep at night?
Who knows what the prosecutor meant in context. The prosecutor could have meant, “Gee, even though your client broke the law, he or she didn’t really do anything wrong.” For example, if a defendant was temporarily holding a bag of weed for a friend, despite the fact that some might view this as doing nothing wrong, the defendant still has clearly broken the law. The prosecutor’s statement only makes sense if you equivocate breaking the law with doing something wrong. It isn’t the prosecutor’s job to decide which law is good and which law is bad: it’s to prosecute those who break the law.
Sorry - I meant to write, "The prosecutor's statement is offensive only if you ..."
Prosecutors have discretion to charge or not charge. If a prosecutor believes that somebody broke the law but didn't do anything wrong, the prosecutor doesn't have to charge that person with a crime.
To use the "temporarily holding a bag of weed for a friend" example, if a prosecutor doesn't believe that the defendant actually owned the weed for personal use, it would be totally unconscionable to charge that defendant with possession. Moreover, the D.A. doesn't HAVE to charge that person with possession. It's not like prosecutors' hands are tied.
It's not about prosecutors deciding which law is good and which law is bad; it's all about prosecutorial discretion, which prosecutors love to use when it suits them (overcharging) and pretend doesn't exist when it's morally inconvenient (sending innocent people to prison).
He could have just been speaking in the statistical sense. That's how I read it, at least. As a guy with a tough job commiserating with another guy who also has a tough job.
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