Prosecutors

Prosecutors are often called America's “chief law enforcement officers.” That term, however, is not sufficiently descriptive and leads to a lack of appreciation of the role of the prosecutor as an officer of the court. Prosecutors are public figures and can establish the tone and public perception of the fairness of law enforcement and justice administration. By whatever name, the prosecutors, without a doubt, are the dominant actors in American criminal justice. As the Supreme Court commented in Young v. United States (1987), “Between the private life of the citizen and the public glare of criminal accusations stands the prosecutor. [The prosecutor has] the power to employ the full machinery of the state in scrutinizing any given individual.” The prosecutors’ dominance comes from their deciding which charges to bring, whom to charge, whether to proceed to trial, and what punishment to recommend for those found guilty.

The prosecution of crime in the United States differs strikingly from prosecution in other Western democracies and even markedly from other English-speaking countries. First, in the United States, there is no central government authority for prosecution, no office that even remotely resembles such an office as the Home Office's Crown Prosecution Service in England. Although the prosecution for violations of federal law rests with the U.S. Department of Justice, the overwhelming volume of the criminal prosecutions are handled at the state and local level and have no connection with the Justice Department. And even the federal prosecutions are divided among 94 somewhat independent U.S. attorneys.

At the local level, each state defines its system for prosecution. This results in a variety of state governmental styles. In some states, the prosecutorial [Page 385]power is either divided or shared with different independent officials. For instance, in Kentucky, the county attorney handles less serious crimes, such as misdemeanors and traffic offenses, and determines at the first instance whether to lodge charges of a more serious nature for the Commonwealth Attorney to try later. On the other hand, in New Jersey, the appointed attorney general has complete jurisdiction and selects the local prosecuting attorneys in each county to handle all criminal cases. In California, the locally elected district attorneys share power with the attorney general, who, on rare occasions, can supercede the district attorneys in individual cases and take over the prosecution. The state attorneys general usually have tightly circumscribed criminal jurisdiction at the trial level, although as a rule, they are responsible for handling criminal appeals. Almost all of the states provide for prosecution on a county level with an office for the prosecutor in or near the county courthouse.

Prosecutors go by a variety of names: district attorney (as in New York); state's attorney (as in Illinois); county attorney (as in Minnesota); prosecuting attorney (as in Ohio); or district attorney general (as in Tennessee). By whatever name, even within states, the various prosecutors’ offices may differ dramatically. Some, such as the district attorney in Los Angeles County, have hundreds of deputies who handle cases in many locations throughout the city, whereas Alpine County, in the same state, has one office with only one lawyer, the elected district attorney. Most of the more than 1,800 state prosecutors in the nation are in very small offices, many of which are part-time.

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