Improving Prosecutions

The Rules of Conduct should add a fiduciary duty to the list of prosecutor special duties. The prosecution and the plea should not be motivated by personal advantage.

Do not spend $2 million prosecuting Martha Stewart on a $40,000 insider trading beef and on lying to the FBI in an informal conversation in her home, in order to get your name in the papers. That prosecutor should have lost his law license.

End all prosecutorial tort immunities, or failing to pass a constitutional amendment, force all prosecutors to waive their immunity if they want to keep their jobs in the executive branch. Tort liability would allow the specialty to police itself through standard of professional due care analyses by the courts. Let them all carry liability insurance as everyone else does.

Prosecutors should also be liable for discretion errors resulting in damage to crime victims, again in accordance to professional standards.

The carelessness of prosecutors fully qualifies for strict liability. But, they are so bad, such a standard would end prosecutions and bankrupt government. They fail to prosecute 95% of serious crime. When they have a guy, 20% of the time they have the wrong guy. That is also true in $million budget, death penalty cases. Worse, they have forced the wrong guy to accept a plea deal. In the case of the $million budget death penalty case, they get the wrong guy to confess to the murder in 25% of exonerated cases. They fed him details of the crime only the murderer would know.

Prosecutors have to be the most failed group of specialists in the entire nation. Maybe, public defenders have a worst record. Those are totally useless.