[Paracelsus]

(12-04-2015 01:57 AM)VincentVinturi Wrote:  

What's up with these prosecutors doing everything in their power to send a kid away for a long time based on flimsy evidence?

Do they not care about the objective reality and what actually happened whatsoever?

Do they have no compunction about ruining lives just for the "notch" of a successful conviction?

It's a little more nuanced than that.

In an ideal world, a prosecutor does care about the objective reality of what happened and makes an independent judgment about whether or not there's enough evidence to send to a jury. They are meant to make those sorts of decisions if only because the court system is clogged like a 60 year old smoker's arteries and trials cost literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to run; a prosecutor is meant to make an actual judgment about whether a given case is in "the public interest" before throwing an accused person in front of a jury to face an allegation. When you hear a prosecutor has declined to send a matter to a jury because there's "not enough evidence", this is basically what's happened, along with an assessment of the evidence and whether it really has reasonable prospects of convicting someone.

In the real world, politics intervenes. Especially with rape cases (and child abuse cases), the case falls into the hands, not infrequently, of one of the following types of prosecutor:

(1) One who is scared shitless of being criticised as a woman hater, rape apologist, or misogynist, no matter how flimsy the evidence is. You will hear such prosecutors referring to their insane decision to take a matter to trial as "leaving it to the jury to decide," even if the evidence is flimsy - because they want the blame for the acquittal to go on the jury, not on them.

(2) A relatively junior prosecutor within a Public Prosecutions Directorate who is assigned a case and told to run it by his superiors, even if it's a piece of shit prosecution that won't get up. In theory a prosecutor exercises independent discretion and could theoretically say "Look, I'm not comfortable with the level of evidence on this, I'm not going to run it, sorry" ... but a prosecutions department is a government bureaucracy, and the structure and potential for advancement usually is pyramidal and amounts to a single-elimination suck-up tournament amongst its prosecutors for the juiciest, high-paying roles. Lower level prosecutors are little more than government functionaries, and must survive as Good Corporate Men just as their counterparts in big corporations do: by towing the line and doing exactly what the fuck they're told to do.

(3) A female prosecutor with a really bad hard-on against men and who thinks the best way to beat men is to out-chest-beat, out-testosterone, and out-convict any other man in the directorate. Not infrequently it's overcompensating for the disgust of the big burly police officers who present the cases for them to prosecute (and who often have disturbing ideological if not personal commitments to putting innocent people in jail.) These prosecutors are nightmares because they are committed both careerwise and ideologically to the poor bastard's conviction, and (in some notable cases) see dirty tricks or "on the line" conduct against defence counsel as perfectly legitimate in a court because they're going after a "scumbag". These ones lose sight entirely of the fact that the government is meant to be a model litigant and it isn't meant to push relentlessly for a conviction, but rather is meant to simply present the evidence for the jury's consideration. At some times this sort of conduct gets to be cultural or institutional within a prosecutions department, and it takes a few notable wrongful convictions for the culture to change ... for a time.