CBL4 said:
I totally agree that there is an important distiction but I do not agree with what it seems you are implying. (If I am making an incorrect inference, I apologize in advance)
I don't know what you think I'm implying.
I agree that a prosecutor job is not to convict people. It is not even to convict guilty people. It is to uphold the rights of defendants, practice according to the rule of law and, given those restrictions, convict guilty people.
A prosecutor's job, broadly speaking, is to represent the government, the state, or the municipality for whom he or she is working in prosecuting alleged crimes committed within its jurisdiction.
Although I wouldn't have phrased it quite the way you do, I think it is accurate to include within his or her duties to uphold the rights of criminal defendants. I suppose that is simply another way of stating that a prosecutor must seek justice and help to ensure that the defendant gets a fair trial.
Nevertheless, our American judicial process, based on the English system, is an adversarial one. That means there are two opposing sides and a neutral judge and/or jury. Since the prosecutor represents the state, the defense attorney is the one who zealously advocates his or her client's position and who is primarily concerned with protecting his or her procedural and substantive rights.
In practice, things tend to get muddy. In practice, prosecutors seldom seem too interested in upholding an accused's rights. In practice, many prosecutors adopt a posture that everyone brought before the court is guilty.
Those can be very dangerous positions if the interests of justice are to be served. It is when prosecutors forget their duty to seek justice and to ensure fairness in the process that we sometimes get manifest and grave injustices such as those LegalPenguin notes.
However, a prosecutor is rewarded by the voters for convicting people especially in high profile cases. A prosecutor who fails to convict or fails to try people is generally punished by the voters. Guilt or innocence and judicial propriety are mostly irrellevant. Convictions are what matters.
When a person is punished for doing his job correctly, there is a problem. That is currently the case for both prosecutors, judges and police.
CBL
Well, there is no doubt that authorities in law enforcement can often feel political pressure to obtain a conviction, especially, as you note, in so-called high profile cases. Unfortunately, the public sometimes gets carried away with emotion and rhetoric, and wants to see someone--sometimes anyone--convicted for a particularly heinous offense. The classic example is the prosecution of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.
By nearly all accounts, Hauptmann's trial was hardly a model of fairness. It was probably the real "trial of the century," even bigger than the Scopes trial or that of O.J. Simpson. Can you imagine the opportuning and grandstanding that went on, given that at the time Charles Lindbergh was probably the best known and best loved international celebrity, and that his 20-month old baby boy had been snatched from his home in the night? Passions were especially high given that Hauptmann was German and had a cold, disaffected demeanor, and the trial took place in the US in 1935, when anti-German sentiment was still held over from the Great War.
AS
