5.7 Courtroom Players: Prosecutors
Lore Rutz-Burri and Chantel Chauvin
Prosecutors play a pivotal role in the criminal justice system, and work closely with law enforcement, judges, defense attorneys, probation and parole officers, victims services, human services, and to a lesser extent, jail and other correctional staff. The authority to prosecute is divided among various city, state and federal officials. City and state officials are responsible for prosecutions under local and state laws, and federal officials for prosecutions under federal law. As discussed in the previous sections, prosecutors are one of the most powerful actors in courtroom workgroup, a fact evidenced in this speech by former Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert Jackson, while he was the U.S. Attorney General, addressed the Conference of United States Attorneys (federal prosecutors) in Washington, D.C. on April 1, 1940:
“The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous. He can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations. Or the prosecutor may choose a more subtle course and simply have a citizen’s friends interviewed. The prosecutor can order arrests, present cases to the grand jury in secret session, and on the basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial. He may dismiss the case before trial, in which case the defense never has a chance to be heard. Or he may go on with a public trial. If he obtains a conviction, the prosecutor can still make recommendations as to sentence, as to whether the prisoner should get probation or a suspended sentence, and after he is put away, as to whether he is a fit subject for parole. While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst. …”
The boxes below describe the roles of prosecutors at the state and federal level.
State Prosecuting Attorneys
Prosecutors represent the citizens of the state, not necessarily a particular victim of a crime. States vary in how they organize the groups of attorneys hired to represent the state’s interest. Ordinarily, the official with the primary responsibility for prosecuting state violations is the local prosecutor who is referred to as the “district attorney”, “county attorney”, or “state’s attorney”. Local prosecutors are usually elected from a single county or a group of counties combined into a prosecutorial district. In many states, the state attorney general’s office has authority that trumps that of local prosecutors, but in practice, the state attorney general rarely intervenes in local matters. The state attorney general’s office will intervene, for example, if there is a conflict of interest or when requested by the district attorney. It is not