Article Review: Alleviating Mass Incarceration

 Past Attempts at Mitigating Prosecutorial Misconduct

    In “The Prosecutor Prince: Misconduct, Accountability and a Modest Proposal,” Pepperdine University School of Law professor Harry M. Caldwell finds that there is no way to quantify the actual number of cases that have been impacted by prosecutorial misconduct and led to wrongful convictions. However, there have been some past and present approaches to monitoring prosecutor’s behavior. Analyzing these efforts is a crucial step before introducing any solutions because it provides context on what has already been attempted. Caldwell examines these attempts in the section titled “Survey of Approaches to Addressing Prosecutorial Misconduct.” This summary will focus on pages 68 to 70.

    His first point looks at the bar association that exists within every state, which houses the responsibility of attorney discipline. Despite this expectation of upholding prosecutorial accountability, misconduct is not usually reported to these associations and in the rare times it is, they do not generally hold investigations or disciplinary proceedings. They also do not have a productive way of maintaining data or records for running effective statistical analysis. Thus, it is clear that state bar associations do not have as much impact on prosecutors as one might hope. Caldwell introduces the possibility of accountability through internal investigations but finds them “suboptimal.” He provides an example of one of these investigations in which 381 cases had their convictions overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct (concealed or falsified evidence). However, only three prosecutors were somewhat reprimanded and none of them lost their license or sanctioned in public. By refusing to hold prosecutors accountable, these theoretically plausible solutions do not actually bring change to the abuse of power these attorneys are able to utilize. Meaningful oversight and discipline for these prosecutors are still a very prevalent necessity for our American criminal justice system.

    With these concepts in mind, please discuss the following question in the comments below: is it practical to rectify these past attempts, or should we look for completely new solutions? No matter what your response is, give some examples on how we can reform, or give examples of original solutions.

Link to Original Paper: https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1101&context=lawreview