Your question presumes that prosecutors are looking for the truth, right and wrong, innocence and guilt.
They are not.
Their job is to prosecute. Hence we've seen terrible stories about people prosecuted and jailed for years because prosecutors knowingly refuse to turn over exonerating evidence.
Judges are also part of this problem. They are paid by government. Their instructions (Rules of Criminal and Civil Procedure) come from government. They have often worked as prosecutors for the government. So their loyalty is to the government. We don't have an independent judiciary. It's been wholly captured by the government.
Getting to the question as to why the innocent plead guilty, when you're faced with the cost of an attorney it's often cheaper and easier to take a plea than to fight. The stress, emotional and mental toll of a legal fight are horrendous. And there is very little guarantee that a defendant will win.
The deck is stacked against you when you go to court. Prosecutors and judges are not there to have a colloquy about the law, the facts, the issues of the case, nor to debate the motivation and intent of the defendant. The prosecutor is there to win. The judge is there to ensure that the well-oiled machine keeps running and that jurors deliver the needed verdict.
>Your question presumes that prosecutors are looking for the truth, right and wrong, innocence and guilt.
>They are not.
>Their job is to prosecute
That's not entirely true. Their job (or at least their office's job) is also to decide when and where to seek prosecution. In theory, determining truth and innocence is a significant part of their job.
The trouble is when that runs up against a politicized, failure intolerant culture that would much rather reward a prosecutor with a strong string of wins (however questionable their methods) over one with the courage to simply present the best case they have and let the jury decide on the facts like they are supposed to.
> Their job (or at least their office's job) is also to decide when and where to seek prosecution. In theory, determining truth and innocence is a significant part of their job.
There are a couple of problems with this:
1. When everyone is guilty of something, prosecutorial discretion is a disaster, not a desirable feature of the system. It's nothing other than the power to bankrupt and/or imprison whoever you don't like.
2. They don't do things by assessing truth and innocence. When my great-grandfather's mind went, some member of another branch of the family got appointed conservator of his estate, and proceeded to embezzle over $600K in "gifts" to herself and her family. My mother discovered this by coincidence, assembled a huge pile of damning evidence, and went to a prosecutor, who said he wouldn't bother charging her because she was a middle-aged woman and getting a conviction would be almost impossible.
My mother ended up suing, and on advice of counsel settled for the documented value stolen, rather than the full legal liability (which is a multiple of the losses). The theory there, as I recall, was "judges hate it when you go to trial even after being offered a settlement, so you should take the settlement".
If a prosecutor's chief career metric is his conviction rate, then he doesn't have much incentive to reelease exonerating evidence.
I wonder if changing the rules would help. Releasing such evidence and causing the case to collapse would not reduce the conviction percentage. Perhaps it could even be counted as a win, increasing the metric, because justice was done.
A truly democratic government also represents the collective will of the people. In America, we don't have a truly democratic government, but I think it's close enough to hold, to the extent that the justice system serves the desire of the people for the appearance of justice. The people can't know whether justice is happening, so its appearance has to substitute for this knowledge. This feedback optimizes the system to provide this appearance. I think we see major shocks when independent research and especially new methodologies for examining evidence (like DNA) disrupt the appearance that the justice is what's actually happening to the expected degree.
Of course I understand the principles of an adversarial system of trials. My question was how did this lead to prosecutors believing their job is to seek convictions rather than justice.
Well, if the adversarial system is effective, then it's the combination of prosecutors driving for convictions and defense attorneys driving for acquittals that produces justice. Hypothetically, only the judge is concerned with justice. And even then, only obliquely, because they only oversee justice of the trial process, not justice in general.
There are fundamentalists in law, just like in religion. A conviction exonerates the lawyer from any responsibility for injustice. After all, the opponent was declared or admitted guilt. Just as a religious leader exonerates himself from responsibility for enabling pogrom or ethnic cleansing as being the written will of the almighty.
They are not.
Their job is to prosecute. Hence we've seen terrible stories about people prosecuted and jailed for years because prosecutors knowingly refuse to turn over exonerating evidence.
Judges are also part of this problem. They are paid by government. Their instructions (Rules of Criminal and Civil Procedure) come from government. They have often worked as prosecutors for the government. So their loyalty is to the government. We don't have an independent judiciary. It's been wholly captured by the government.
Getting to the question as to why the innocent plead guilty, when you're faced with the cost of an attorney it's often cheaper and easier to take a plea than to fight. The stress, emotional and mental toll of a legal fight are horrendous. And there is very little guarantee that a defendant will win.
The deck is stacked against you when you go to court. Prosecutors and judges are not there to have a colloquy about the law, the facts, the issues of the case, nor to debate the motivation and intent of the defendant. The prosecutor is there to win. The judge is there to ensure that the well-oiled machine keeps running and that jurors deliver the needed verdict.