> This is why the public defender's office should be handling the prosecuting of police and the DA should become their defender. You maintain the adversial nature of the current legal system, and you also fund the PD office more effectively. Win win win.
It sounds good on the face of it, but, even assuming that the public defender's office is staffed with amazing defense lawyers, it seems to me that there's no reason to believe that they'll be able to serve as amazing prosecutors.
> there's no reason to believe that they'll be able to serve as amazing prosecutors.
Seems to me there's an awful lot of well documented police behaviour that totally doesn't need "amazing prosecutors" to secure convictions. A high school kid standing up and saying "Here's 40 bystander phone videos of the defendant officer using unreasonable force. There are affidavits from all the photographers in exhibit b. The prosecution rests."
(And the flip side to your argument also holds, the Das won't haver the most skilled/experienced defenders available either. Seems totally fair to me.)
I don't think it's that easy. Many people have a positive bias towards police. The police lawyer will come in and cite some frightening statistics about police injury and fatalities on the job, the officer will say that they used the minimum amount of force they were trained to. They only have to convince one juror to get a hung jury.
The free market is an interesting possible solution. Mandate government LE cases to be tried by a law firm. The law firm cannot be paid by the city, but is only compensated with a % fee of any fines levied as a result of a conviction, as well as any civil cases pre-empted by a conviction (i.e. if you have a civil case for wrongful death, and the defendant is convicted of murder, you effectively immediately win the civil suit as well due to the lower burden of proof for the same crime). Law firms that want to softball their prosecution go out of business, and we can still have lawyers that are well-versed in the prosecution of crimes. I am wary of unintended consequences, though.
Simply changing venues would be an option (i.e. require that cases against LEOs cannot be prosecuted in the county the LEO serves in), but I worry that the level of police solidarity would cause the police in the new county to pressure the DA. It might be worth a try though.
It sounds good on the face of it, but, even assuming that the public defender's office is staffed with amazing defense lawyers, it seems to me that there's no reason to believe that they'll be able to serve as amazing prosecutors.