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July 7, 2023
"Prosecutorial Mutiny"
The title of this post is the title of this new article authored by Cynthia Godsoe and Maybell Romero available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:
Elected progressive prosecutors face resistance on many fronts to their reforms of the overly harsh and racist criminal legal system. One of these forms of resistance is particularly corrosive — internal dissension by line prosecutors. This resistance flummoxes criminal legal system reform and undemocratically interferes with the will of the electorate. This resistance, which we term “prosecutorial mutiny,” is also unethical under the American Bar Association’s Model Rules. Given the pervasiveness of such mutiny alongside other sources of back-lash to criminal system change, we argue that progressive prosecutors are not the panacea to all the criminal legal system’s ills as many have hoped, and that resources should be focused on supporting other sources of change to the system.
July 7, 2023 at 09:55 PM | Permalink
Comments
Stated title: "Prosecutorial Mutiny."
More accurate title: "Career professionals chafe under ideological extremists."
Posted by: Bill Otis | Jul 8, 2023 4:04:13 PM
While that might be true in some places, in other places, the career professionals understand that the elected gets to set policy. The real problem that some of the progressive prosecutors have had is that the skill that it takes to win elections is not the skill needed to manage an organization. (It's not just prosecutor's offices that have that issue, but it gets a little more attention when it's the prosecutor's office having the management issues.) I know that, here in Missouri, we just had a rather big blowup on the east side of the state. But there were two progressive prosecutors on that side of the state, and, initially, both had no problem attracting attorneys willing to do the work. One has managed to keep the attorneys, but the other had trouble keeping the attorneys because of the way that the office was managed.
Posted by: tmm | Jul 9, 2023 10:38:18 AM
tmm --
When the "prosecutor" is a poorly disguised defense lawyer, he or she is going to have trouble keeping actual prosecutors even with wonderful office management skills.
Posted by: Bill Otis | Jul 9, 2023 5:07:42 PM
