Prosecutors Not Getting It

In a criminal case, it is not., The District Attorney of New York County vs. Oscar Kowensknophenskibumenstein, it is The State vs. Oscar Kowensknophenskibumenstein.

Prosecutors should, but generally don't, support a full fact finding as a part of the criminal justice system, and any such fact finding must necessarily involve an adversarial process.

Any prosecutor who seeks to defund public defenders because a proper defense makes their job too hard, should not be a prosecutor.

In fact, they probably shouldn't be a lawyer at all, nor should they hold a position that requires any ethics at all.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, about 18 percent of those who have been exonerated of a crime they did not commit actually pleaded guilty to the crime they did not commit. It is likely that the real percentage of actual innocence is much higher, as 95 percent of convictions end in guilty pleas rather than trials and many innocent people are willing to take plea deals rather than face spending the rest of their natural life in prison. This tends to be especially true for those who cannot afford a lawyer and thus have to rely on overworked and underpaid public defenders.

Last week, with the hope of better complying with the United States Constitution and maybe incarcerating fewer innocent people, Michigan legislators practically doubled the state's budget for indigent defense. One would think this would make everyone happy, since most decent people would prefer not to send poor people to prison for crimes they didn't commit, but one group of people is pretty upset over this — prosecutors.

Michigan prosecutors are coming out and saying, without shame, that poor people having an adequate defense makes it impossible for them to do their jobs, on account of the fact that they have other things to do beyond sending innocent poor people to prison for crimes they did not commit.

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Kent County Prosecuting Attorney Chris Becker told the Free Press that he is offering $72,000 as a starting salary for an assistant prosecutor and can't get anyone to bite.

This would make it seem as though public defenders are making far more than prosecutors in Michigan. This does not appear to be remotely true, as they tend to make between $52,306 and $65,629 (and that's not a starting salary). As the Free Press notes, there are many other reasons why people may not be too excited to be prosecutors, given that they are hardly the most beloved people in the country right now.

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The fact that the prosecutor's office is not built to handle everyone receiving an adequate defense gives away the game. Poor people were never meant to have the same access to legal help as the rich. Plea deals were not simply being reserved for those who were actually guilty and had no chance of winning in court due to the piles of evidence against them, but also for innocent people who assumed they had no chance of winning against the county's prosecutors. If the prosecutor's office is falling apart because indigent people have access to an adequate defense, then we have to consider the fact that our system was designed to send innocent people to prison.

We need to dismantle our criminal justice system root and branch. 

It's not that it does not protect the rights of the accused, though it does not, and it is not that it aggressively eschews anything like accountability, though it does not.

It is that it does not serve the needs of our society.

The current makes our society baser and less successful.