Daily Archive: June 27, 2016

Confessions of an Ex-Prosecutor – Reason.com

Twenty-one years ago, the day O.J. Simpson was acquitted, I began my career as a federal prosecutor. I was 26—a young 26 at that—on the cusp of extraordinary power over the lives of my fellow citizens. After years of internships with federal and state prosecutors, I knew to expect camaraderie and sense of mission. I didn’t expect it to influence how I thought about constitutional rights. But it did.

Three types of culture—the culture of the prosecutor’s office, American popular culture, and the culture created by the modern legal norms of criminal justice—shaped how I saw the rights of the people I prosecuted. If you had asked me, I would have said that it was my job to protect constitutional rights and strike only what the Supreme Court once called “hard blows, not foul ones.” But in my heart, and in my approach to law, I saw rights as a challenge, as something to be overcome to win a conviction. Nobody taught me that explicitly—nobody had to.

When I left the U.S. Attorney’s office after more than five years, my disenchantment with the criminal justice system had begun to set in. Now, decades later, my criminal defense career has lasted three times as long as my term as a prosecutor. I’m a defense-side true believer—the very sort of true believer that used to annoy me as a young prosecutor.

From: Confessions of an Ex-Prosecutor – Reason.com