Much has been said recently about issues relating to misconduct by prosecutors, or what might appear to be misconduct.
I personally can’t say that any intentional misconduct has occurred, so I’ll leave that to the reader to decide. What does concern me is the lack of full and complete investigative efforts by the agencies that have the responsibility to fully and completely provide facts to the prosecutor. If the case(s) are purely of a political nature, it really won’t matter what the investigators find, but I’m talking about the run-of-the-mill criminal cases. Some investigative agencies get a mindset that they don’t make mistakes and they don’t learn from past mistakes. I was involved in one case in 2019 where the investigative agency failed to secure a necessary search authority and all the evidence was thrown out. Without evidence, the charges were also thrown out. Three years later the same agency committed the same error, and the evidence was tossed. Lack of training or plain and simple disregard for the proper procedures? I fault the investigative agency for this omission but why would the government continue to prosecute the case when it was clear the investigative agency didn’t follow the law? Didn’t the prosecutor review all of the case details before filing charges against the client? Aren’t they responsible for reviewing and analyzing the findings by the investigators? We look for things like this and, fortunately for our clients, we find them. Is it an intentional oversight on the prosecutor’s behalf to fail to recognize these errors or did they just not have a clue? When prosecutors don’t do their jobs, what’s the recourse by the client? Sure, if the charges are dismissed and there is no prosecution you might say that there’s no need for regress. I disagree. Every client is seriously impacted when they are alleged to have committed an offense, proven or not.