A prosecutor speaks out

What prosecutors are thinking.  Western Justice peers into the mind of a prosecutor.  Here are his thoughts about our system of justice.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. Although they won’t admit it to your face, most prosecutors AND defense counsel are saying to themselves [during guilty pleas]: “Who cares about the Constitution? I’ve got places to go, things to see, cases to prepare, let’s move it along here!…..”

He also says “The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive and as impossible to define as those which make a good gentleman The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive and as impossible to define as those which make a good gentleman.”  Tnx APubDef.

Update: He appears to take issue with my either my quotation, or my misunderstanding the purpose of his blog.

Now, I don’t mean to bash him, so please don’t get me wrong.  In fact, out of most of the prosecutor (or ex-prosecutor) blogs, his is probably one of the least-self serving. However, most prosecutor blogs or public statements are neither funny nor insightful. Here is why. 

• Comedy is there to comfort and the afflicted, and afflict the comforted. Prosecutors, even on bad days, are just not afflicted. Even if they are losing every case (as sometimes happens) they are never in the hopeless positions that criminal defendants often find themselves in. Indeed, they can even satisfy themselves that their losses are just an example of “justice prevailing” and the “government always winning” in a criminal matter. Making jokes about criminal practice, which can (and does) ruin peoples’ lives every day just seems smug.
• Public mocking by prosecutors is almost always directed at defendants (or their attorneys). In private, however, prosecutors mock cops. Especially cops with less than six years of post-secondary education. They make fun of their educations (or lack thereof) and the way police reports are written. Somehow this humor (no matter how mean-spirited) never makes it into public statements by prosecutors.
• Although prosecutors have senses of humor when they share it with the public it usually comes off as mean-spirited.  Catalogues of “dumb criminals” or courtroom antics are nothing more than making fun of someone who was too stupid to make an honest living or commit a crime on such a sophisticated level that he wouldn’t get caught. The implication is that the reader (and perhaps any prosecutor) is smarter than these people who can’t even resort to a life of crime properly. When defense lawyers do it, they are bemoaning the “bad facts” that their clients face.  I guess it is no surprise that I have never seen a prosecutor subscribe to the belief that every criminal sentence represents a failure of society to educated people in a way that would have prevented such a crime from being committed in the first place.
•  With few exceptions, most public statements be prosecutors follow the adage that “A simple lie is more true than a complex truth.” To a prosecutor speaking to the public, the law needs to be distilled into some assertion of authority. So, when, for example, asked about the law of “locker searches” in high schools, a prosecutor will say something along the lines of “I am a lawyer, and I know that kids can be searched.” While there is some nuance in that statement, there is no way in hell that a prosecutor would ever explain the contours of a high school student’s Fourth Amendment rights with any detail.
• Prosecutors generally don’t want to discuss weaknesses in their positions. So they don’t. (On the other hand, a defense lawyer’s “position” usually becomes moot after a trial, so they are free to acknowledge that a given position was “week.”)

Despite all this, there are actually a lot of ethical, fair, and intelligent prosecutors out there.  The problem is that when they say when they get an audience.